The Sense in the Sacrifice
by Rasial
Summary: A Sweets x Brennan road-trip romance. After Agent Flynn's body is found, Booth insists that Brennan and Sweets go off the grid in an effort to draw Pelant out of hiding. The enraged 'Monument Killer' recreates a Renaissance tableau with the bodies of his victims. Booth's plan backfires when Sweets and Brennan get a little too used to relying on each other. Minor Character death.
1. Chapter 1

Sweets' face was contorted into an ugly sneer as he recognised the voice on the other end of the line. "Dr Sweets, it's so good to talk to you."

"What do you want, Pelant?"

"I want to admire your handiwork. That was you, wasn't it, who came up with the how-to-host-a-murder plan with Agent Flynn?"

Sweets didn't answer.

"No? Nothing? But it had shrink written all over it!" Pelant exclaimed, amused.

Sweets waited to see what the sociopath's game was.

"Pouting will get you nowhere, Dr Sweets." Pelant warned. "Besides, I know it was you. It's right here in your psych profile."

Sweets could hear Pelant ostentatiously rustling some paper. _What a showman. He thought. As if a hacker would keep paper documents._ "You're going to shrink a shrink, huh?" Sweets asked aloud, trying to keep him talking.

"Well, it's a subjective field," Sweets could hear the smile in Pelant's voice "but my favourite FBI profiler says that children with troubled childhoods, you know, that experience violence, often grow up to perpetuate it."

"Was your childhood troubled, Pelant?"

"Actually it was very pleasant." Pelant laughed.

"Well, you were fat. Kids must have teased you." Sweets said offhandedly.

Pelant ground his teeth. "And you were a geek. Kids must have punched you."

Sweets chose not to answer.

"Bet it seemed easy, the playground, after foster-daddy dearest." Pelant taunted. "But you see, Sweets, adjusting to violence like that, it means you're damaged. For a second-rate psychologist in other regards, you've got a little too much insight into criminal behaviour."

Sweets swallowed and put his game voice on. "You worried I'll catch you?"  
"I'm worried you'll outperform me." Pelant chuckled. "Just think of all the scars you'd know how to inflict – all the broken bones you've felt from the inside..."

Sweets set his jaw and tried not to let his distress show in his face. Pelant probably had a stray camera trained on him right now.

"So, what, this phone call is motivated by jealousy?" Sweets tried.

"No, Lance, this is an offer. Think of me as a prospective sponsor." Pelant encouraged. "You and I could have a lot of fun with the Jeffersonian team."

"That is never going to happen," Sweets assured the serial killer "and A.A. was an interesting analogy – sponsors are supposed to save people. What do you think you can save me from, Pelant?"

"Mediocrity." Pelant shot back. "But before I go, you should know that an internship with me is a compulsory module. One way or another. You'll be hearing from me, Dr Sweets."

Sweets stared for a moment after the phone clicked in his ear. Thinking. Then he strode back inside the FBI building and headed for Booth's office.

"We need to talk."  
"Sweets, have you heard of knocking?" Booth asked, feet crossed on his desk, looking up from an open file.  
"No time. Where can we talk?"  
Booth's eyebrows twitched. His eyes darted around, and scanned the hallway outside.  
"Pelant?" he mouthed.  
Sweets gave a small, businesslike nod.  
"I know a place."

After a maze of corridors in the bowels of the building, Booth cranked an old wheel-operated metal door which reminded Sweets of a gun store or maybe a bank vault. He'd never been anywhere down here before.

"Here." Booth ushered him in and flicked on a light. There were shelves in the room but they were empty. "There's no cameras, no computers, not even air conditioning. Pelant-proof." Booth smiled tightly. "So what's up?"

"Pelant contacted me." Sweets said, leaning heavily against the cool brick wall with his hands in his pockets. "He said some very worrying things, there's a degree of mirroring in his behaviour that - "

"Whoa, Sweets, don't profile him, just start from the beginning." Booth patted his shoulder to steady him.

"Right. Okay. He said the fake-murder plan must have been mine, he talked about psychology and alluded to my childhood and suggested I was a good profiler but a crappy psychologist because of my insight into violence."

Booth gaped at him, and tried very hard to think of something to say that _wasn't_ agreeing with a serial killer. "Well, uh..."

"Gee, thanks Booth." Sweets muttered.

"No, Sweets, you're a great shrink, really. Don't let Pelant get to you."

"That's not all." Sweets continued. "He said I'd be good at what _he_ does and offered to be my sponsor."

Booth stared at him slack-jawed and then, after a moment, burst out laughing. "You. A serial-killer. And this guy is supposed to be a genius?" he guffawed.

Sweets sniffed.

"No, no, you're right, this is serious. He really thinks he can recruit you?" Booth folded his arms.

"He implied that I wouldn't have to be a willing pupil." Sweets sighed.

"Which means he's going to rig the next event to involve you."

Sweets nodded. "I think he means to draw me into the murders somehow, give me moral dilemmas." He said. "Psychologically speaking, this is a huge escalation. He's never tried to parley with one of us directly before."

Booth looked guilty for a fraction of a second before slamming into neutral, but Sweets caught Booth's arm. "Has he?" Sweets asked.

Booth scowled, then lowered his voice. "You can't tell anyone. Anyone!" he insisted.

"I promise." Sweets said.

"Booth swallowed. "Pelant called me after Bones proposed. He made me turn her down, or he was going to kill five innocent people."

Sweets gasped. "Oh, I so knew it!"

Booth frowned at him.

"Not about the innocent people part, but I figured Pelant was involved somehow." Sweets concluded.

"Yeah well, try not to look so happy about it." Booth muttered.

"Brennan will understand when she finds out." Sweets comforted him. He paused. "And then, she'll be pissed that you didn't tell her."

"I couldn't tell her! You've seen Bones _act_." Booth sighed.  
"Yeah. I have." Sweets agreed soberly.

"So what does all this mean?" Booth asked Sweets.

Sweets steepled his fingers under his chin then rearranged his fingers into a gun shape, where his index fingers were the barrel pointed up at his chin. "He's establishing individual relationships with us. He sees me as being like him, a potential playmate. You, he sees as a rival. What he wants is relationships worthy of his intellect. A surrogate family, in a twisted sense. It's why he chose the Jeffersonian. What he wants is..."

"Bones." Booth finished grimly.

They looked at each other.

"How much do you want to bet that Pelant has been contacting her privately and instructing her to keep it secret too?" Sweets asked suddenly.

Booth slammed a hand against the wall. "He's been playing us all individually."

"We should see if anyone else has been targeted one-on-one." Sweets said.  
Booth nodded. "I'm on it."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Why are we meeting in Limbo?" Angela asked the group. It was weird seeing all the interns in the same place at the same time. Daisy and Fisher were competitively digging through a drawer; sure this was some sort of group assignment from Brennan.

"Because I'm the boss and I told you to." Cam smiled brightly at Angela, a warning shot. "And Booth told _me_ to." she confided.

Angela exchanged looks with her husband and their hearts collectively sank.  
"It's Pelant. Gotta be." Hodgins smiled ruefully, keeping his voice down.

"Well, Cher, as you are not _my_ boss, perhaps you could explain what I'm doing here when I should be prepping for the Hans-Loughtor case." Caroline huffed.

"No, but I can." Booth swept in with Brennan and Sweets in tow. "Officially, we're here to divvy up responsibilities for the biggest missing person taskforce in FBI history, spring cleaning on behalf of our new governor." Booth looked around the room. "Unofficially..."  
"It's Pelant." Sweets broke in.

The interns looked at each other.

"What we need to know" Booth stepped forward, looking into the eyes of each person gathered "is if Pelant has contacted any of you personally. Privately. He might have said there would be consequences if you told anyone, but there's no cameras or computers down here, and we've all got our phones switched off, right? So as long as we confine any talk to this room, he won't know."

Everyone looked guiltily at one another.

"I'm going to ask you each individually. Has Pelant made contact with you?"

He looked at Hodgins.  
"No, man, I swear."

"No, sweetie." Angela said, looking past Booth to Sweets.

Daisy chimed in "Lance will know if you're lying. He's like a human polygraph. And no, Pelant didn't contact me." she added.

"Nope." Wendell said as Booth passed by.

"I doubt I'm interesting enough to rouse the attentions of a serial killer." Fisher deadpanned. "No." he said when Booth gave him a probing look.

"Dont look at me Cher. If _I'd_ heard from the slimy little worm, you'd have heard from me moments later." Caroline said.

"No Sir." Finn said.

"He didn't contact me." Aristoo added.

"Nor me." Cam said.

"Nor me. I don't even work in forensics." Clark said.

"Well?"

"As far as I can see, they're all telling the truth." Sweets said. "That just leaves..."

"Pelant contacted me." Brennan said earnestly. "He suggested..."  
She hesitated.

"Go on, sweetie." Angela encouraged her.

"He suggested that Booth turned down my proposal because I had abandoned him, when I went off the grid, and that Booth no longer trusted me." Brennan's clear blue eyes glimmered with tears she refused to shed.

"He also said there was a female serial killer, worse than him, who's been eluding us, and that he would help me catch her. The Ghost Killer."

"Dr Brennan!" Wendell gasped. "You can't honestly think you should work with one serial killer to catch another."

"Easy." Booth warned him, raising a hand to shush Wendell.

"I didn't accept his offer. I didn't turn it down either." At this Brennan looked Booth in the eye for the first time since she'd begun. "Some of her victims are here, in Limbo. I can't work it out..."

"Okay." Sweets clapped his hands together, drawing the crowd's attention away from Dr Brennan so she could pull herself together. "Whenever anyone needs to talk about Pelant, we come to this room under the pretext of working on the governor's 'Spring Cleaning'. If Pelant contacts you, come see Booth or myself and say "I found something in Limbo." that's the code term. Got it?"

The crowd murmured agreement.

"And be careful. Pelant is making this personal. Take extra precautions." Sweets' eyes lingered on Daisy as they milled out.

"Bones! Why didn't you tell me?" Booth yelled the minute everyone bar the three of them were gone.

"Why do you think?" Brennan shot back, angrily. "We smile and we kiss but we don't talk. Not anymore."

"Guys, this is just what Pelant wants. I think you, Booth, can understand why Dr Brennan chose to keep this from you." Sweets prompted.

He glared at Sweets, but stopped yelling.

"The question is, what do we do now? Do we accept his offer?" Brennan asked.

"No." Both men said at once.

Brennan blinked at them.

"This is classic escalation." Sweets said, stepping closer to Brennan. "He makes your relationship closer by giving you something you want, help with a murder, but once he's that much closer to you, he can do that much more damage."

Slowly, Brennan nodded.  
Booth let out the breath he had been holding, relieved.

"He contacted me too." Sweets said. "Basically, Pelant wants me to be his apprentice and you to be his girlfriend."

"He wants to be Booth." Brennan said simply.

"I'm not Booth's _apprentice_..." Sweets began petulantly, then looked from Brennan to Booth. "Sorry, not important. More accurately, Pelant wants to _replace_ Booth as the moral and patriarchal centre of the group. He's confident he can win you and I over."

"Why does he want us?" Brennan asked.

"Because you're the smart ones." Booth answered.

Sweets raised his eyebrows at being put in Dr Brennan's rarefied category, but Brennan didn't question it. Instead, she argued "Hodgins is very intelligent. And Fisher has a surprisingly high IQ..."

"But thanks to my research, he thinks _you_ can be won over by any logical argument and that _I _can be tempted into immorality because I'm damaged goods." Sweets rolled his eyes.

"So, what's the plan?" Sweets looked to Booth.

Booth was very grim. "It's the same play as the body swap." he said finally. Only the kills aren't what we have to take away from Pelant." He swallowed, and when he looked up, his eyes were full of hurt. "It's you two. You need to go somewhere he can't watch you or taunt you. Break down his connection with the pair of you."

"No, Booth." Brennan said, apprehending what Booth was suggesting. "I won't do it again."

"Do what?" Sweets asked.

"Go off the grid. He wants us to hide from Pelant off the grid."

"I don't_ want _you to." Booth gritted out. "But if he can't find you, it will derail his plans to induct _you_," he looked at Sweets "and _woo_ you." his eyes settled on Brennan.

"I'd have to take Christine." Brennan said coldly.

"And Max. He'll keep you safe." Booth acknowledged, tears in his eyes.

"Is this it, Booth?" Brennan asked in a small voice. "Are we breaking up?"

"No. No, guys this is ridiculous." Sweets interrupted, unable to see his 'it' couple torn asunder.

"Have you got a better plan?" Booth said, anger mixing with his grief. "How are you going to stop Pelant when he's got a gun trained on you, huh, insisting you stab some innocent girl to learn the trade?"

"We don't know what he'll do." Sweets objected

"Exactly. All we know is _who_ he'll do it do. That's our only card right now, so we'd better play it. You two are going bush."

"Three. I won't go without Christine." Brennan insisted.

"Four." Sweets corrected. The pair turned to look at him. "Max makes four." he shrugged.

"It's settled then." Booth said.

"No, no wait, I can't just leave my patients!" Sweets cried. "Who knows how long we'll be gone?"

"Not long if I can help it. With all the people I care about tucked safely out of the way" Booth avoided Sweets' eyes as he said this "and Pelant off his game, things will come to a head."

Sweets turned to Brennan. "It could work. If you or I were to turn Pelant down outright, he might retaliate, but if we're just missing he'll be driven to locate us to regain his sense of control. Distracted. What do you think? You know Pelant best."

"I don't like it." Brennan said. "He could target any one from the Jeffersonian while we're gone and without their two most valuable members, they'll be severely disadvantaged. And who will work on the Ghost Killer case?"

"Wait, you think_ I'm_ one of the most valuable members of the team?" Sweets boggled.

"After myself, yes. Against Pelant, your profiling, though subjective, has been highly effective. Perhaps you think in similar ways." Brennan stated.

Sweets grimaced. "Man, why is everybody saying that today?"

"So I guess I'll just take my _useless_ gun and my _useless_ tactical training and head back to the FBI?" Booth smarted.

"I didn't mean it like that, Booth." Brennan said coldly. "But you must admit, your skill-set is less useful in _finding_ Pelant and more useful in dealing with him once he is found."

"Which is why we need to draw him out of hiding." Booth said darkly.


	2. Chapter 2

They'd met in the basement of the FBI. At this very moment, Angela was running decryption software on a cold case, trying to make it look juicy enough to distract Pelant while Brennan and Sweets got out of D.C.

It was disconcerting, seeing them dressed as Joe and Mary-Jane Normal, Booth thought. Bones had blonde hair pulled back in pigtails, and a grey cardigan over a pale blue top and very tight, faded jeans. No doubt she was trying to look younger, since, undercover, she would be playing the role of Sweets' wife. Usually she loved going undercover, but instead of glowing with excitement, she avoided eye contact, focusing on Christine, wiping her face with a damp cloth.

Sweets was wearing a pale-green army jacket that was a touch too big for him, a sweatshirt, jeans and runners. Booth noticed he was no longer wearing his father's watch, but some cheap digital thing.

"Don't you think analog is safer?" Booth quipped, gesturing down at Sweets' watch.  
"Oh right, of course, I didn't think." Sweets fumbled to get the watch off him as though it were an explosive device.

"Take a deep breath there, champ." Booth said loud enough for Brennan to hear, taking a step towards Sweets and clapping him on the shoulder. She was still distracted with Christine, so he leaned closer.

"Did you pack your gun?" he asked in a lowered voice.

"No, of course not. That would be against regulations." Sweets said stiltedly.

"Well, if you had packed it, I'd tell you to ditch it and take this one." Booth handed him a flat case that Sweets judged by weight to contain a handgun and ammo. "Unregistered, untraceable."

"Where did you...?" Sweets began, but Booth shot a pointed look over at Brennan, so Sweets sighed and swapped the new gun for his that he had concealed in his backpack.

"Pelant. If he comes after you, or Bones, or Christine, you shoot to kill. You got that Sweets?"

"If the situation warrants it I..." Sweet met Booth's eyes. "Yeah. I'll shoot to kill." He nodded slowly, trying to make the words seem real.

"That's my partner and my kid you got there. I'm trusting you to take care of them."

Sweets nodded solemnly. "I will. Remember, Pelant's going to act out once we're gone."

"Who do_ you_ think he'd target?" Booth asked suddenly. The possibility of Pelant hitting the Jeffersonian team in retribution had weighed heavily on them all, so they'd barely talked about it.

Sweets shifted his weight, and made an open gesture with his hands in his pockets. "If it's one of the team, as a profiler, I'd guess Cam. The Jeffersonian would be thrown into chaos without her; it would be a great way to lure Dr Brennan back. Plus, she's close to you." Sweets added.

"What does your gut say?" Booth asked, staring intently at Sweets as the younger man rubbed distractedly at the back of his head.

"I'm probably being an overprotective idiot, but I'm worried he'll go after Daisy." Sweets blushed. "We're not together any more, but it would still be a good way to get to me."

Booth only nodded. "I'll put a protective detail on both of them."

"What are you two doing? If we're going to go, we ought to go. Unless you've changed your minds about the necessity of our departure?" Bones groused. She was mad about being sent away and primarily held Booth responsible.

"I'll give you two a moment." Sweets grabbed his pack and backed out of the room.

They turned to one another.

"We swore we would never do this again." Brennan said, one hand resting on the child seat, eyes brimming with tears. "Let Pelant run our lives."

"But we _have_ been doing it. Pelant has been running the show this whole time. There's only one way to make it stop." Booth reminded her, running the tips of his fingers through a wisp of her newly-blonde hair. "I hate saying goodbye to you." He added softly.

"Then don't!" Brennan cried, pulling away from him. "Come with us. Let some other FBI agent chase Pelant down. Aren't we better as a team?" she pleaded.

"I have to see this through. I'm doing this for you and Christine, you know." He said, voice suddenly urgent.

"I know." Brennan said quietly.

She picked up the child seat and Christine's things, and walked out to the basement car-park.

Sweets was already there behind the wheel of a nondescript sedan. Booth had arranged for a cleaning crew to be working down there so that the cameras could be manually disabled without flagging as suspicious on Pelant's surveillance.

Brennan huffed as she clipped Christine's seat into the central seatbelt, and slammed the door abruptly before joining Sweets in front.

"Something wrong, Honey?" Sweets asked, trying to break the ice about their awkward new roles.  
Brennan didn't even notice. "It's infuriating. The way Booth makes me _feel_ things, and _need_ things that I never needed before, things my life was perfectly functional and comfortable without, and just when I start to _rely _on those things – he takes them away!"

Sweets nodded as he pulled away from the curb. "This undercover thing with Pelant, it's going to be tough on all of us, especially you, since you and Christine have been forced back into an experience that you promised yourself that neither of you would ever have to repeat. But for Booth – "

"It's not just since Pelant came into our lives. He's always done it." Brennan insisted, though her voice was calmer and more controlled. "The inconsistent nature of his affection and interest over the years _significantly_ contributed to my initial resistance to our becoming a couple."

Sweets raised his eyebrows at the frank admission and filed the information away to shrinkify later.  
"Co-dependency's a bitch, huh?" he tried to joke as he merged into traffic, but Christine chose that moment to gurgle, and Sweets glanced up into Brennan's disapproving eyes.

"Uh, sorry. Forgot she was in the back there."

Brennan only frowned.

Sweets tried to think of something to say that would make Brennan feel better about her over-strained relationship. She had been through a lot lately, but she also hated talking. Finally, he settled on: "Is there anything you need?"

Brennan blinked. "I'm fine." Sweets noticed that her shoulders relaxed a little, though.

"Where are we meeting Max?" Sweets settled back into the driver's seat.

"In Houston in five days."

Sweets sniggered. "We're hiding out in Texas? We're going to stick out like sore thumbs in Texas. I definitely will."

"It's only a meeting place. We'll get you a hat."

Sweets smiled at Brennan's rare joke. "Max is no doubt thinking of a way to spirit us over the border." He suggested.

"Not to Mexico – he hates Mexico." Brennan replied. "Maybe to Cuba through the Keys."

"Castro's Cuba?!" Sweets boggled.

"There's no better place to escape the reaches of technology." Brennan shrugged.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They drove for a long time, Brennan staring quietly out the window. Sweets tried to pretend he wasn't watching her, but every now and then his eyes would flick away from the road to check on her. It was not that he was uncomfortable with silence, _per se_, more that he could physically feel her mulling thoughts over, and as a psychologist it was difficult not to let that drive him crazy.

Finally, he said "There's a rest-stop ahead. You wanna pull over, give Christine a break?"

"It's probably wise – you have been driving for longer than is recommended. But you should opt for parking under the cover of foliage to obscure any aerial footage Pelant may be gathering."

"You think he's tapping into satellites?" Sweets asked, amazed.

"He commandeered a drone." Brennan pointed out. "Hiding from Pelant is going to be far more challenging than merely hiding from law enforcement."

Sweets pulled in under a copse of pines, near a damp picnic table, and turned off the engine. He turned to Brennan "Do you think Pelant was keeping tabs on you last time you went off the grid?"

Brennan tilted her head in thought as she unpacked Christine's things. "I don't think he was able to closely observe us. Otherwise he would have intervened in the research Max and I were doing. But last time he was coercing our behaviour, our status as fugitives. This time, we are not part of his plan, so he'll be far more determined to find us."

Sweets spread an old blanket on the table so that Brennan could place Christine on it. Then he walked to stretch his legs, keeping to the line of trees. He wondered whether at even this early age, Christine would remember this upset as part of her childhood, the moving around from place to place, the absence of her father, and the air of tension the adults in her life were no doubt generating.

"Do you want me to take her for a while so you can have some lunch?" Sweets asked once he had returned to the table.

Brennan smiled, as if caught off-guard by the little gesture. "Yes, thank you."

She crunched into a Granny Smith, watching as Sweets slung her daughter on his hip, and showed her the different shapes and colours of one fallen deciduous leaf after another.

His face was animated, his voice theatrical, and Christine giggled with delight.

Brennan was initially surprised at how easy a travelling companion Sweets was. She had expected to resent his presence more, having done this on her own, quite efficiently, once before. Their mutual comfort was no doubt because they had a pre-existing domestic relationship from when Sweets had briefly lived with her and Booth.

One of the things she had liked about Sweets when he was staying with them was the genuine eagerness with which he reached out for her daughter – he'd never minded when she grizzled because she was teething or when he had to change a diaper. Perhaps this was because Sweets was just so desperate for familial experiences.

Sweets looked up suddenly, from Christine to her, and Brennan almost blushed, certain that Sweets would not find her analysis of him all that flattering, although she, personally, felt it only increased her regard for him.

"So, Dorothy" Sweets tried the name out. "Are you almost ready to get goin' again?" as he spoke, he drawled just a little, and put a relaxed slouch into his frame.

Brennan smiled. She liked acting, and Sweets appeared rather good at it. "Yeah Sam, just let me git packed up here and we'll head on out."

Sweets suppressed a laugh at Brennan's overacting, and silently thought Texas might be a good fit for them after all.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

After another two hours of driving, Sweets said "Do you think we could talk or put on the radio or something? I need a little help staying focused."

"Of course," Brennan folded up the camping magazine she had been scouring for stopover places. "What would you like to talk about?"

"Anything really. If this was really a camping trip, what places in America would you want to see?" Sweets asked, off the cuff.

"I'd like to visit the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania. Although the radio-carbon dating is contentious, it is possibly the longest continually-inhabited site in North America, occupied for over nineteen thousand years, since Paleo-Indian times." Brennan said.

Sweets whistled. "What's contentious about the carbon-dating?"

"There may have been contamination from older carbon deposits due to coal-bearing strata in the watershed." Brennan replied, surprised that he was interested.

"Bet you could sort that dilemma out for them if we stopped by." Sweets teased.

"Quite possibly. I am the best in my field." Brennan agreed.

"Where else?" Sweets prompted.

"I'd like to take Christine to see the cliff dwellings of the Ancient Pueblo cultures at Mesa Verde." Brennan admitted. "I'd also like to visit Graceland."

"Really? You're an Elvis Presley fan?" Sweets asked dubiously.

"I like the one about the blue shoes. And the hound dog." Brennan smiled. "But I think the messianic culture that has built up around the location is far more fascinating. It's the pop culture equivalent of pilgrims travelling to Mecca."

Sweets grinned. "They do call him The King."

After a moment, Brennan asked. "Where would you visit, Sweets?"

"I've never been to the Grand Canyon. Or Disneyland." Sweets added sheepishly.

"Perhaps one day, we'll take Christine, and you can join us." Brennan offered.

"Uh, thanks, but I think once you're six foot they frown on you riding the tea-cups." he said.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It was dark when they pulled into a diner. That morning, Booth had explained how important it was that they get away from the main roads and their associated surveillance early on; before Pelant figured out they were missing. Brennan had huffed that she knew what she was doing, but Sweets had internalised every bit of advice as a resource he could draw on later. Thus, he and Brennan had had their first fight about how long they would drive – both Christine and Brennan were hungry, but Sweets had wanted to push ahead just a little bit longer at each neon sign they had previously passed.

"Finally." Brennan said and bundled Christine out of the car. They hurried inside, and Sweets loped awkwardly along after them, having grabbed Christine's parka from the back seat in case she was cold.

It was the kind of place with sticky vinyl seats and placemats and crayons for kids to draw on. Low-rent though, it probably doubled as a place to sober up for most of its clientele. There was a pool table in the back and a television set to mute, flickering gridiron replays over the order window.

"I have to go back to the car." Brennan fussed as soon as Sweets approached her. "There's a draft and I forgot Christine's..."

Sweets gave a half-smile and held up the parka.

"Oh." Brennan said, and sat down heavily beside her daughter, still not quite able to forgive Sweets for taking what she saw as 'Booth's side'.

"Shall I go order?" Sweets asked.

"Yes." Brennan replied, pulling the parka over her squirming daughter's limbs. "Anything but pie."

"Dearie, whaddaya like?" The tired matron of the establishment asked.

"Could we trouble you for a cheeseburger, a kid's spaghetti meal, a juice-box, two cups of Joe, and a burger with a fried egg instead of a patty? My wife's tryin' one of those meat-free fads." Sweets tried out his new character.

"That'll be twenty-two-eighty." Sweets baulked a little at the price but handed over the money.

"I'll bring the coffees over." The matron assured him.

When he turned back to Brennan, he knew something was wrong.

Her eyes were glued to the television screen.

"May I?" he grabbed the remote from the counter and hurried over to her, scrambling to turn up the volume.

"_...The Jefferson Monument will remain closed to the public while the investigation into this heinous crime is underway. The FBI has confirmed that they consider this case linked to the human remains used to deface the Whitehouse statue of President Lincoln in 2012._"

"We have to go back." Brennan demanded.

"Doc – Dot, we can't." Sweets emphasised, nudging his head over his shoulder to the now-empty order window, warning her not to blow their cover.

But Brennan wasn't listening. "You don't understand! They showed the remains – a brief shot, but I recognised the bone structure..."

Sweets' heart sank.

"It was Wendell. Mr Wendell Bray." Brennan was crying.

Sweets looked from her tear-stained face, to Christine contentedly scrawling with her crayons, to the matron who was on her way over with the coffee. _One day and this is already harder than I thought it would be._ Sweets thought. He grabbed Brennan's hand and dragged her into the ladies' bathroom.

"Okay, we need to talk about this." Sweets began.

"There's nothing to talk about! I should be back there helping solve _Wendell's murder_." Brennan tried to push past him and back out to the diner but Sweets wrapped his arms around her, holding her in place. "Let me go!" she yelled, crying and beating on his arms until she finally, she allowed Sweets to pull her into a hug.

Sweets had tears in his eyes too, as he nestled Brennan in to his shoulder and stroked her head and back soothingly. He was feeling so guilty. Part of his brain was busy pointing out the ways Wendell's death was their fault for goading a serial killer. The rest of him was glad it wasn't Daisy, and that made him a terrible person, he knew.

He also knew he couldn't keep Brennan with him by sheer force of will. He was going to have to talk her round. Manipulate her. And he was already hating himself for it.

"Breathe." Sweets said gently, as Brennan quieted down. He dampened some toilet paper and held it out for her to put against her face. When she was slightly less blotchy, he rested his hands lightly on her upper arms, and stood facing her. "Let's not make any rash decisions. We can go back out to your daughter, eat our meals, and then talk out our options. Okay?"

Reluctantly, Brennan nodded.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

By ten o'clock they'd eaten their meals. The matron had retired to a back room. Christine was slumped over Brennan's lap, napping, while they sipped their topped-up coffees.

"Without us, they could be overlooking evidence." Brennan insisted.

"That's true." Sweets agreed. "But Pelant did what he did to lure you and I back to D.C. That suggests that so far, he hasn't located us through surveillance. It also means that if we go back, he wins."

He judged by the competitive little frown on Brennan's face that he was framing his argument well.

"He also had to act quickly – we've only been gone for twelve hours. He must have been rushed; he might even have been sloppy."

"Pelant is never sloppy." Brennan said.

Sweets tilted his jaw. "Still, it's possible, that by distracting Pelant, keeping him looking for us, we are contributing even more to his capture than we could back home." He sipped his coffee.

Brennan looked thoughtful.

"I mean, we already know who did it. The big question is 'why Wendell?' and why the Jefferson Memorial?" Sweets posed.

"Those are two questions." Brennan corrected.

"Wendell is stoic, working class..." Sweets profiled aloud.

Brennan said something so quiet Sweets couldn't hear.

"Hmm?" he asked.

"I said 'was'. Mr Bray _was _stoic." Brennan corrected quietly.

A pang of empathy shuddered through Sweets' chest. "Yes, of course. Sorry."

"It's fine, at least you can do _your_ work from here." Brennan muttered. "Mr Bray was athletic, family oriented, quiet about his own concerns, with a strong moral centre." _Like Booth_ she almost said aloud, but she didn't have to; Sweets understood.

"Dr Brennan, I know you feel powerless away from the evidence, but one glimpse from a television screen, and you were able to give me a vital clue in my continued profiling of Pelant. You've already helped the case by exploiting our limited communication with D.C." Sweets reassured her.

"It was highly unprofessional of them to allow the news team to film the remains, even briefly." Brennan observed.

"I know. You think maybe the FBI let that one shot slip through as a message to us?"

"Perhaps." Brennan conceded, in a voice that told him she'd been wondering the same thing.

"What about the Jefferson Memorial?"

"It's an obvious reference to the Jeffersonian." Brennan stated.

"Yeah, but Pelant's messages are never that simple. What do you know about the memorial itself?"

"It's supposed to emulate the Greek Parthenon." Brennan started "Perhaps a reference to another Greek myth?"

"Maybe. Whats inside?"

"A statue of Thomas Jefferson." Brennan looked at him as if he were simple.

Sweets almost rolled his eyes. "What else?"

"The interior walls are decorated with passages from the Declaration of Independence." Brennan noted.

"Which passages?" Sweets asked.

Brennan frowned, thinking. "One of them begins: _'I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.'_ That's the whole excerpt."

Sweets grinned. "That memory of yours...that was amazing."

Brennan allowed herself a small smile.

"Well, basically, Jefferson is just saying there that change is good." Sweets mused. "Although the enlightenment language about 'laws' and 'institutions' is interesting in the context of the partnership between the FBI and the Jeffersonian."

"Didn't you say that Pelant intends to use logic to change my opinion of him?" Brennan asked.

"Of course. 'As new truths are discovered, manners and opinions change.' Dr Brennan, you are on fire tonight."

Brennan looked pleased."There's also the 'We hold these truths to be self-evident passage..." Her eyes lit up. "There's a larger quote, around the dome! '_I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man_.'

"_That_ sounds like a Pelant message." Sweets sat back, impressed. "It's from one of Jefferson's letters, where he explains why he won't allow state religion, right?"

Brennan nodded.

"Hostility...tyranny... he's definitely pissed that we're gone." Sweets looked a little excited. Brennan supposed the way Sweets felt about linguistic markers, however misguided, was how she felt about bones.

"_Every form of tyranny over the mind of man_ could be a warning, that we can't escape his surveillance, or alternatively his defiance of our mind-games, saying he won't allow himself to be affected by our absence. Or...he's launching an attack against the concept of morality itself, taking the Nietzschean stance that moral codes are the straightjackets that prevent us from achieving true greatness, our ubermensch status."

"Which one is it?" Brennan asked.

Sweets shrugged. "I have no way of knowing for sure. Possibly all three. But given that Wendell is the victim, and his call to me before he left, I'm backing the last one."

"A war against morals because they imprison the mind?"

Sweets nodded.

Brennan looked at him curiously. "What exactly did Pelant say to you?"

Sweets eyes shuttered as they always did when he didn't want to talk about something. "A lot of pseudo-psychoanalytical rubbish about how my insight into criminal behaviour is linked to my childhood."

Brennan nodded. "And this makes you uncomfortable because it might be true."

Sweets' eyes flared. "No! C'mon! He told me I'd make a good serial killer!"

"Actually, I believe under the right circumstances, you _would_ make a good serial killer Sweets. You're intelligent and manipulative...although, despite your penchant for violent videogames, you don't have much tolerance for the various states of decomposition of human remains. "

"You see? Thank you. I'd puke all over the place." Sweets agreed testily.

Brennan eyed him. He was obviously offended.

Sweets used his ire to launch into his proposal: "If we keep working on the Pelant case from the road, will you at least agree to head to Houston and meet your father there? We can revisit the notion of heading back to D.C then."

Reluctantly, Brennan nodded her head.

In his mind, Sweets punched the air with his fist. He wasn't going to let Booth down.

"It's late; you wanna get out of here?" Sweets asked.

Brennan nodded.

She and Christine filled the car with quiet snores not long after they'd headed off. Sweets knew they weren't going to make it to a motel that night, so he drove until the caffeine wore off, then parked under a tree by a rest stop and got a few hours sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Sweets was woken by a hand gently shaking his shoulder.

"Mom?" Sweets said, half asleep.

"Not quite." Brennan smiled. She handed his a granola bar from the supplies in their trunk. "I ought to drive this morning."

Sweets yawned and bit into the granola. "Yeah. I think you better." He struggled out of the driver's side and went to splash some water on his face at the rest-stop bathrooms.

He came back to the car in time to witness Christine enjoying a jar of apple-sauce.

"How are you feeling?" he tested the waters.

Brennan's nose wrinkled at the question, but having apparently decided that Sweet's voice had more of the 'friend' than the 'shrink' tone about it, she said: 'Better, thank you. I have figured out something else I can do to upset Pelant."

Sweets waited.

"I can solve Chloe Campbell's murder without him."

"The Ghost Killer case?" Sweets asked. "How? Her remains are at the Jeffersonian."

"They were found in Virginia."

"That's too close." Sweets shook his head. "Too close to D.C."

"The most recent set of remains associated with the Ghost Killer case were found in Texas, in 2012." Brennan said slyly.

Sweets couldn't help but smile at Dr Brennan's improved social skills. "Nice negotiating tactic, making this Texas case seem like the lesser of two evils. Do we have a name?"

"No but we have a location. The Chapparal Golf Course, Dickson."

"And how far might that be out of Houston?" Sweets asked skeptically.

"About forty minutes, depending on traffic." Brennan said over her shoulder, loading a sing-songing toddler into the car.

Sweets folded his arms. "And you expect me to believe that Max just _happened_ to pick Houston as our meeting place on a whim?"

"I don't expect you to believe anything." Brennan smiled coyly. "However, I feel it is a rather convenient coincidence." 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sweets read aloud to Christine from her favourite book, "doing the voices" for her, while Brennan drove, for the better part of the morning. They were taking a rather circuitous path, favouring country roads, so although Houston was only about twenty-two hours of direct driving time away from D.C. they were prepared to take the whole five-day allotment to get there.

"You know, we should find a motel or a trailer park and just lie low for a couple of days. We can't keep Christine cooped up in the car forever." Sweets mentioned.

"Something close to a park." Brennan agreed.

They settled on a motel outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky. _The Lucky Star_ was a run-down place off the back of one of the roads which was once upon a time a major artery, but had been bypassed by a motorway. It was still close enough to town, though, that they would be camouflaged by a few others drifting in and out.

Brennan scoped out the front desk while Sweets made small talk with the clerk. He was asking shrewd questions about the amenities, playing the part of the down-on-his-luck family man trying to stretch his last dollar. _Be just friendly enough to be forgettable_, Brennan remembered Max telling her once. Sweets appeared to be a natural at it. No cameras, even on the till, she noticed, and a sign-in book, rather than a computer at check-in.

She looked at Sweets sideways and gave him a small, approving nod. Sweets changed gear in the conversation and committed them to two night's stay. The room key hung from an old varnished wooden slat with the number nine on it.

The room smelt faintly of cigarette smoke, but at least it had a private ensuite and a small porch and steps down to the yard so Christine could play.

"There's also a park on the corner of Conway and West. Short walk." Sweets said, apparently aware that she'd zoned out when he was information-hunting the grey-haired man on the front desk.

Brennan put Christine down and went straight over and turned the TV on. The picture was fuzzy, but she picked out a news station and left it on, set to mute. Scanning in case anyone mentioned D.C.

Sweets took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Then, he dug something out of his pack and handed it to her.

"A polaroid camera?" Brennan was puzzled.

"I got it off eBay on a whim. Modern cameras all have chips in them, and mark photographs with the time and GPS locations of the snap. If you do find evidence in the Ghost Killer case that you want to preserve, it's probably safer to do it this way. Less traceable." Sweets shrugged.

"This could be very useful. Thank you." Brennan smiled at his thoughtfulness. "But when we left, you didn't even know we'd be working on a case."

"Well, I was never a boy scout, but 'be prepared' always sounded like a good motto." Sweets joked.

"I can readily imagine you as a boy scout, actually." Brennan returned.

"Noooooo...not me. I was something of a difficult child." Sweets smiled, lowering his eyes.

"Booth would say you have never stopped being one." Brennan jibed.

"Yeah well, Booth probably was an _actual_ boy scout." Sweets shot back.

"No, but he was an altar boy." Brennan laughed.

"Really?"Sweets joined in the laughter, but then his face grew longer, more serious, and his eyes seemed to track something in the distance. Brennan recognised that as one of his thinking faces. When he realised Brennan had been staring at him expectantly for a while, he smiled and shook it off.

"Sorry, I was thinking about that quote again. '_I have sworn upon the altar of God'_ Perhaps Pelant's next crime scene will literally be a church." Sweets pondered.

"Or perhaps the posing of the body had something to do with religious iconography. I was unable to ascertain anything more than identity in the brief glimpse the news footage permitted," Brennan said, "But I felt I had seen the pose in a religious context before."

Sweets glanced at the clock. "It's only two p.m. It will be hours until the news replays and we can get a better look. Do you want to take Christine to check out this park?" 

Brennan smiled.

The afternoon sun was amber and the grass in Kentucky really was blue, Sweets noticed. Brennan was running ahead of him, holding Christine by the hand, over towards the brightly-painted play equipment.

_He didn't have any memories that went like this._ He thought. The kind of childlike wonder that equates an unexpected playground with the coming of Santa Claus - that quasi-real time of infant memory where joy and magic are the same thing.

He also couldn't help but notice the light catch in Brennan's hair, and sparkle in her eyes as she looked over her shoulder at him, then continued running. He really shouldn't be looking at a friend, a co-worker like that, he supposed, but this whole experience was quasi-real – playing the father, the husband, a life he'd always wanted but figured he might not get to have. No point beating himself up for having eyes, he concluded. And Brennan was so beautiful when she let her defenses fall away, running and romping with Christine, her movements, her expressions carefree.

He stood and watched for a while, transfixed, until another family entered the park. Sweets went in to 'Sam' mode, as he'd started to dub it in his head, and roped a lazy arm around Brennan's waist so he could lean forward and ask over her shoulder if she wanted him to push them on the swing before they left.

Brennan looked around and realised they were no longer alone, and loudly scooped "Chrissabelle" up onto her lap. Sweets pushed Brennan gently, leaning into the lazy pendulum rhythm, as Brennan went "Whoooooosh!" with Christine laughing all the way.

Just as they were walking away from the play equipment, Christine yelled "Sly! Sly!"

Sweets didn't recognise that one. He furrowed his brow and turned to Brennan.

"She wants to go on the slide." Brennan explained. "But we have to go, Chrissy."

"Aw, give her a go. You go up top and I'll catch her." Sweets harangued her.

Brennan smiled. "You're as bad as she is!" but she climbed up the play structure and said to Christine, "Ready? Go!" and let her down.

Sweets grabbed her at the bottom and swung her up in the air. "Such a big girl! Do you want to go again?" he lifted her back up to Brennan's arms.

The third time she came down, Sweets picked her up and said "Okay, time to go!"  
"No, Daddy!" she lisped.

Sweets blinked and froze. Then he looked up to see if Brennan had heard it too.

She clearly had.

Brennan climbed down from the play equipment and stalked towards the park gates. Sweets carried Christine and hurried to catch up with her.

The sky was night blue and only yellow at the horizon. They walked briskly home without mentioning Christine's mistake. It was dark when they put the key to the lock and opened it.

Brennan straightway turned on the muted television and the alarm-clock radio. Sweets took the opportunity to have a quick shower, to give Brennan some space.

When he came back out, still toweling his hair, she had made them peanut butter sandwiches. He figured she must not be too mad when he saw there was a short stack of them for him.

"You made me two?" Sweets asked.

"You have a high metabolic rate." Brennan said, engrossed in the silent TV images.

"That's a nice way of saying I eat like a teenager." Sweets grumbled. But he ate the sandwiches.

Brennan put Christine to bed. Sweets was scared to offer to help in case she thought he was encroaching on parental territory.

Once the toddler was well and truly asleep in the middle of the queen-sized motel bed, Sweets sat at the table and chair set in the dim light and scribbled down some profiling notes on Wendell's murder. Brennan had her turn in the shower and Sweets noticed she took a long time. The water had probably gone cold on her.

He wondered if she was okay in there.

When she came out, dressed for bed in flannel pajamas, she looked completely normal except for a small stress pucker in her brow.

"Any thoughts as to how we do sleeping arrangements?" Sweets asked, looking up.

Brennan registered for the first time that he was dressed for bed in sweatpants and a T shirt, much as he had done when he'd stayed with them. Many men preferred to sleep shirtless (Booth preferred to sleep nude) but Sweets never liked to reveal the myriad of scars across his body if he could help it.

His question was nonsensical, though. "There is only one bed. The three of us will have to share it. I daresay it will be more comfortable than last night in the car."

"I bet." Sweets agreed, rolling his neck until it crunched.

Brennan put the volume on low for the late news bulletin.

"_The hunt continues for a serial killer in our country's capitol who poses his victims at Presidential monuments, striking first at the Whitehouse Lincoln statue in 2012, and yesterday at the Jefferson Memorial._" The image of Wendell was shown once again on the screen and the was a click as Brennan snapped a still of the image with the polaroid camera.

"_...FBI sources say they are closing in on the killer, but independent analysts have suggested these politically-staged murders may be acts of terrorism_."

Brennan gripped the slowly-developing picture of the crime scene tightly, as she turned off the television. She put the polaroid to one side to analyse in the morning.

Sweets looked up. "There's a lot going on right now. You and Booth. Being on the run again. Wendell. What Christine said at the park. Do you want to talk about any of it?" He asked the question with the fatigue of someone who already knew the answer.

Brennan eyed him frankly. "There _are_ a number of things going on. I don't see how talking about them will in any way reduce that number."

"Okay. But I'm here, if you need to talk. Not my profession. Just me." Sweets said quietly. 

He turned off all the lights, then they lay down either side of Christine, went to sleep.

Sweets woke up to the sound of moaning. _The not-good kind of moaning_.

His eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw that Christine had snuggled closer to him in the night, and in the widest portion of the bed, Brennan was thrashing around, having a nightmare. He got up, tucked the blanket and his pillow back around Christine, then walked around to the other side of the bed and sat by Brennan.

He knew a lot about nightmares. It had been an area of interest to him because he'd had so many. He stroked his hand down her shoulder and arm lightly, in a repetitive, petting motion, hoping to bring back her bodily awareness to the room so she could wake up naturally. Her thrashing stilled, but still she whimpered.

"Dr Brennan." Sweets tried softly. "Dr Brennan...Temperance?"

She woke up and stared up at him with uncomprehending, terrified eyes.

"It was a dream, Dr Brennan. You're safe." Sweets said.

"Oh God, Sweets. It was awful!" Brennan cried, looking physically ill. "I dreamed that Pelant was taunting me. About the Ghost-Killer case. And I gave in. I asked for his help. Wendell told me not to." Brennan's voice broke "So Pelant got angry and cut him down with a machete. He fell into pieces."

Sweets had no doubt that Brennan had seen just such an event on one of her anthropological jaunts in the developing world. He wondered, not for the first time, whether she had ever suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even now she was awake, she was shaking and gripping painfully tightly to his arm.

"Shove over." Sweets said finally. He got into the bed beside her, intending to simply make her feel more protected, sandwiched between he and Christine, as his parents had done for him when he had wordlessly padded into their bedroom some nights. But to his surprise, she grabbed onto him and clung. He put a tentative arm around her.

"Can you sleep like this?" Brennan asked him softly.

It was as much a question about his physical comfort as it was about the emotional blurring of the line of their friendship. But they were under a very strained situation, Sweets considered. It was like war with Pelant. And people at war throughout the ages must have relaxed social mores to provide one another with comfort.

"Sure." He said. He swallowed a lump of guilt as he considered how Booth would feel if he found out what had transpired this evening: the double-blow of stealing his daughter's recognition that afternoon and spending the wee-small hours of the morning pressed against his girlfriend in bed.

_When Booth said 'Take care of my partner and my kid' this was probably not what he had in mind._

That was Sweets' last thought before he drifted off to sleep, arms curled protectively around the sleeping anthropologist whose head was on his shoulder.


	4. Chapter 4

When he woke, Brennan was no longer entangled with him, and he could hear the noise of an enthusiastic toddler coming from the porch outside. _Thank God we didn't have to do the awkward morning after thing._ Sweets thought, on remembering the night before. He'd been partially terrified of waking up with an erection pressed against her or something. And had that happened, he wouldn't have needed to wait until he got back to D.C. for Booth to kill him. Brennan was fiercely capable of doing that on her own.

He went over to their supplies and pulled out some pancake mix, adding water and shaking. There was a dingy hotplate in the room, next to the kettle, so he made them both some coffee while he waited for it to heat up. They didn't have a lot of condiments, but Brennan had packed honey and he figured that would do. He normally made shapes with pancakes, but then again, he normally didn't make them with pre-mix batter on an uneven hotplate.

He served them up with a squirt of honey and chopped banana, and headed out to the porch.

"Morning." Sweets smiled cautiously, handing Brennan her pancakes and putting down Christine's smaller plate. "There's coffee inside. Do you want me to feed her?"

Brennan was feeling a little shy after the night before, an uneasy feeling she was unused to associating with Sweets. His age and profession had always given her an assured sense of her own superiority in his presence, and even when she had realised his social, emotional, and evaluative skills in the field exceeded her own, it had never made her uncomfortable. Her skills were more valuable. But having gone to him last night for a sense of comfort and protection...it seemed to recalibrate their power balance of their relationship.

And that made Brennan wary.

"Yes please." She said, accepting her pancakes and retreating inside to the coffee.

Getting the combination of pancakes, banana and honey in a toddler's mouth without getting the rest of her face dirty was an impossible challenge. By the time Sweets had finished, and brought Christine inside, his own pancakes, sitting on the table, were cold.

Brennan crouched down to clean her up and hand Christine some plastic blocks. As she stood up, she saw Sweets sit down to his cold breakfast and sighed.

"I'm sorry Sweets. You shouldn't let me do that."

"Do what?" Sweets asked, shoveling in another mouthful of pancake and honey.

"Use you like that." Brennan insisted. "When I need a break, you take Christine for me. When I'm upset, you sooth me. When I have a childish nightmare, you hold me."

Sweets shoveled in another mouthful, and pushed the plate back now it was empty. When he swallowed he answered "There's nothing childish about nightmares."

"But don't you see? You don't have to try to be Booth for me." Brendan implored.

A dark expression shadowed Sweets' lips for a moment.

"I am not trying to 'be Booth' for you. I'm being myself." He said in very measured tones.

He straightened up in his chair. "Didn't I babysit Christine for you, and cook for you and Booth when I stayed with you?"

"Yes."

"And haven't I spent most of our professional and personal relationship comforting you when you were upset, worrying about your emotional needs, your relationships and your family all by myself, without having to 'emulate' Booth?" Sweets pressed. "Did you think you were using me then?"

Brennan looked stricken. "No, but..."

"Then what's changed? I spent time with Christine because _I_ like her. I try to be considerate of you because _I _worry about you. I suggest that if this is making you uncomfortable_ now_, when it never did before, it has more to do with your issues with Booth than your issues with me."

Brennan had her head cocked to one side, as she often did when she was trying to process emotional information. "I didn't mean to upset you. You're a good friend, Sweets."

"As are you, Dr Brennan."

Brennan seemed relieved. "I am, however, beginning to see why Miss Wick calls you Lancelot."

Sweets gave a wry smile. "Hey, feminism doesn't mean chivalry is dead."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Brennan spent the rest of the morning examining the fully-developed image of the polaroid. Although only Wendell's torso was visible, propped up against the statue's base, with his head lolling on his right arm and his left arm hooked backwards, she was sure it reminded her of a painted depiction of Christ she couldn't quite place.

"I'm going to the library." Brennan declared.

"Does Hopkinsville have a library?" Sweets asked.

"It did when our street atlas went to print." Brennan pointed at an icon on the map.

Sweets peered closer. "It has an airstrip and a heliport. It should have a library. Won't there be surveillance though?"

"It depends on the library. If it appears to have security cameras, I won't go in."

"We should go with you." Sweets added. He didn't think adding 'Booth would want me to.' would help. Instead he said: "Libraries usually have a kids' section. Christine could play, or at least look through some picture books."

"We'll be more conspicuous as a group." Brennan argued, clearly not wanting her wings clipped.

"If there are no cameras, it won't matter. And you said if there _were_ cameras, you weren't going in." Sweets countered cheerfully.

Thankfully, the public library was a small, dusty place that only had two security cameras, one trained on the loans desk and one on the two public computer terminals. There was a college library not too far away, and clearly most of the community relied on that one.

Sweets found some wooden puzzles in the kids' section and laid them out on the floor for Christine, his eyes following Brennan as she paced around their Dewey Decimal system. They hadn't even dared to use the computer catalogue to search for 'religious art' or ask for help at the front counter, so Brennan was trying to look like she was simply browsing as she wandered the shelves.

When she found the Art History section, she sat down on the floor and started leafing through.  
Over an hour later, Christine had grown bored of solving puzzles, then of chewing on puzzle pieces, then of throwing them. Sweets dutifully collected them back up and then took Christine over to her mother.

"You almost done? Chrissabelle's gettin' restless." Sweets asked in character.

"Almost, darlin'. Look through this pile, would ya? I'm tryin' to pick one to print on a mug for Momma." Brennan pushed a pile of books towards him, as he crouched down and let Christine go so she could cling to Brennan's side.

After scanning three more books, she said. "Bingo. Whaddaya think?" She handed the book to Sweets. Inserted like a bookmark into the page was the polaroid she'd taken.

"The Decent from the Cross. That's real nice." Sweets said quietly. Then suddenly, loudly, he sneezed. Brennan's eyes widened a little as she realised he'd torn the page out of the book, covering the sound with the noise of the faked bodily function. Part of her was horrified that anyone would damage a book, part of her was impressed that Sweets, of all people, would take the initiative by stealing.

"D'ya reckon we could go now? Have some lunch?" Sweets smiled cheekily.

"Sure thing, hon." Brennan stacked the other books away as Sweets folded the page and slipped it and the polaroid into his pocket.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They'd grabbed some take-away macaroni cheese in tin-foil containers from a mom-and-pop greasy spoon to bring back to the room with them.

"No wonder middle America is obese." Brennan had scoffed when she recalled what they'd eaten lately. "I hope Christine doesn't develop a palette for this kind of food."

"Hey, at least we didn't make our pancakes with bacon grease this morning." Sweets smiled.  
"Besides, you and I can both eat our weight in Chinese takeout, so I'm not sure the east coast has any right to be snobby."

Brennan smiled, caught out, but said pointedly: "I don't eat bacon."

"Right. I've always wondered about that." Sweets said through a cheesy mouthful. "You say you're not a vegetarian for moral reasons but merely because it's a healthier lifestyle."

"Yes." Brennan confirmed.

"But I've seen you get pretty wound up over issues of animal cruelty. Are you sure you don't just use health reasons as a cop-out because it's easier to argue?"

"It's very easy to make the moral argument for vegetarianism." Brennan countered. "First, it is unnecessary for human diets to be carnivorous, and so to eliminate meat from the diet does us no harm but reduces the net pain and suffering of other species on the planet. Secondly, vegetarianism has a much lower carbon footprint, because herd animals are responsible for methane emissions and pastureland inefficiently ties up arable land that could be used for other crop production. Thirdly, human knowledge of the internal experiences of other species has increased dramatically in the last hundred years and we now know that the sentience and emotional experience of domesticated species at times rivals the complexity of humans. Pigs, for example, are capable of experiencing clinical depression."

Sweets raised his eyebrows at this.

"Fourthly, the emotional and aesthetic argument against cannibalism is also applicable to domesticated mammals, since the organs of cows, sheep and goats taste identical to those of human beings, although their flesh is different. Except in the case of porcine flesh, where the surface proteins of the pig are so similar to humans that we use them in organ transplant experimentation."

Sweets stopped eating. "You're telling me pigs get depression AND they taste like humans?"

"Many cannibalistic tribes have made that comparison, yes."

"God...I'm never eating bacon again."

Brennan laughed. "To accept the notion that Homo Sapiens is entitled to domesticate and eat other species less advanced and intelligent than ourselves is to implicitly accept the idea that it would be okay for you and I to eat a less intelligent member of our own species, or that a technologically advanced and intellectually superior alien race would have the right to eat us, should they so choose."

Sweets looked at her with big, brown horrified eyes that reminded her somewhat of a cow's, which she found ironic given their conversation.

"But in answer to your initial question, I am a vegetarian because of its health benefits."

Sweets pulled a face. "Yeah. Right."

Brennan only grinned.

Once their take-out containers had been disposed of, Brennan spread out the stolen page and the Polaroid while Sweets opened the book he'd been making case notes in.

"_The Descent of the Cross_ by van der Wayden is a Renaissance panel dated at about 1430...as Christ's body is removed, the Virgin Mary swoons at the foot of the cross and Mary Magdeline weeps..." Brennan skim read. "The body is distinctively positioned to resemble a crossbow, the feet still nailed together, the back arched and the arms taut, to represent the patronage of the Greater Guild of Crossbowmen who commissioned the artwork." Brennan stared down at the polaroid. "The picture is blurry and I can't see the feet, but look at the torso."

Sweets wrinkled his nose in disgust as he looked, but nodded. "They look like they match to me." He peered back at the stolen page. "What does the artwork mean?"

"It has come to represent the Virgin's suffering along with Christ...see how she adopts a similar 'crossbow' position...the mourners weeping over Christ's body evoke the sentiment associated with early Flemish painting."

"Who are the other mourners?" Sweets asked suddenly.

"Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome, the virgin Mary's half-sisters, John the Evangelist, Nicodemus, a young male servant, Joseph of Arimathea, a bearded servant with a jar and Mary Magdalene. Why, is that important?"

"It might be. The paintings that Pelant references usually have only one central image or character. This is the first tableau."

"You think the mourners signify the Jeffersonian team mourning Wendell?" Brennan blanched.

"I don't know, maybe. Does this room have a Bible in it?" Sweets asked.

"In the bedside drawer."

Sweets spent the afternoon in the middle of the bed, pouring through the King James edition and scribbling notes into his book which he leaned against his knees. Brennan was feeling strangely deflated that this clue was spurring Sweets' profiling on, while she could not get her hands on Wendell's remains, or even any closer to material evidence from Chloe Campbell's or the Texas man's murders.

She began looking up circuitous routes from Hopkinsville to Houston. When she exhausted that, she re-packed their things into the car, so they could make an early getaway in the morning. Then she and Christine went for a walk.

Sweets was still hard at work when she left.

She found herself kicking at loose gravel as she walked towards the park. She let Christine climb on the play equipment, staying close enough to catch her if she fell, but not partaking as she had the other day. It had been more fun when Sweets had been with them.

Brennan found herself resenting Sweets for burying himself in his work, not coming to the park, and thus ignoring Christine and her.

_But didn't you complain this morning that Sweets had no business trying to emulate Booth? No doubt he is trying to give you space. Which is a good thing. Living so closely with others in confined spaces almost always leads to conflict._

But if she was honest with herself, Brennan didn't feel irritated sharing her space with Sweets. The simple acts of living together, looking after Christine together, hunting down clues together, these were intimacies she had been missing ever since Booth had turned her proposal down months ago.

It hit her in the face so hard she stopped moving, though Christine was reaching out to her. She hadn't missed Booth _any more than usual_ in the last two days, because she'd been missing him for months.

Earlier, she had not been annoyed because Sweets was filling in for Booth, but because Sweets was filling in for what Booth used to be.

Because, just for a moment, _she had liked Sweets better_.

Of course there was no sexual motivation behind this, Brennan rationalised. Sweets was a handsome young man, granted, and occasionally she'd found her eyes lingering. He seemed a little younger and sexier in street clothes than in his terrible suits. When he'd put his arm around her in the park and breathed into her ear, yes, she'd had goosebumps for a moment. But it was simply that by taking care of her and Christine so attentively, he had played on her maternal instincts, which during the early stages of infant-rearing were honed to recognise and create strong bonds with 'familial' males. That was all.

That, and the surprising realisation that Sweets attained a kind of masculinity that was different to most other men she knew. His strength was in staring down trauma. His own. Brennan's past. Booth's Past. Their line of work. Zack. Vincent Nigel Murray. Wendell. He had taken one look at the body of one of their mutilated friend and turned to see if Brennan needed comforting. She had woken up screaming from a nightmare and he'd respected her fears.

Brennan suddenly felt very lonely without him. She half-wished there was someone with whom she could talk out her feelings, and bitterly pined for a glass of wine and a conversation with Angela.

It had fallen dark while she was thinking. Calling over her daughter and placing her on one hip, she headed back to the motel. She was sure everything would make more sense once Pelant was dealt with and they were back in D.C. 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Brennan expected that Sweets would still have his nose buried in his papers, but when she got in, he was serving up what looked like a vegetable stir-fry.

"Hey, you're back. I was starting to get worried. Our ingredients are a little limited, but I took your 'middle America' comments to heart and raided the supplies."

Brennan smiled. "Smells good."

"Garlic makes everything smell good." Sweets beamed. "Except people's breath."

Brennan grabbed a bowl. "That's really only an issue if you're planning to kiss somebody."

"Or, you make sure your date also eats the garlic." Sweets quipped. "Problem solved."

Brennan looked at the garlicky bowl in front of her and started at the implication, but Sweets was busily dishing up a smaller serve for Christine and didn't notice.

_For all his love of psychoanalysis, it seems Dr Sweets can't see a Freudian slip when he makes one. Brennan thought. Or perhaps I'm being hypersensitive.  
_  
"Did you make any progress on the case?" Brennan asked.

"I have some theories." Sweets said guardedly. "I believe _you'd_ call them guesses."

"Since we have limited access to tangible evidence, I have nothing better to do that engage in the speculative."

Sweets chewed on the inside of his cheek, but decided not to bite back: "I am trying to connect the tableau in the _Descent of the Cross_ to the anti-religious message in the Jefferson memorial. I believe the tension in the crossbow pose signifies to Pelant the way a rigidly applied moral code can bend us out of shape. Not that he's _truly_ a Nietzschean, but that's the ideology his playing with this time."

"Like when he pretended to be a Libertarian hacktivist?" Brennan asked.

"Exactly. At first, I thought Wendell was supposed to represent Christ, given his posing, but then, Christ is the centre of his religion, and at the Jeffersonian, Wendell is more like your acolyte, in religious terms."

"So I'm Christ?" Brennan asked.

"No, Booth is Christ. You're the Virgin Mary."

"That would make me Booth's mother." Brennan screwed up her nose.

"No, you're being wicked literal. The Virgin Mary is the only one to truly share in Christ's suffering and sacrifice. So much so that she _swoons_. That's the point." Sweets eyes were animated and he leaned back in his chair. "She's also the one who _just dropped the skull_."

Brennan picked up the picture. "So who are you?"

"John the Evangelist – he writes the Gospel of John." Sweets pointed a red clothed figure catching the swooning Mary.

"You wrote a book about Booth and I." Brennan suggested.

"Yeah, and at the Last Supper, John is about to drink from a poisoned chalice, but he blesses it first and the poison rises as a serpent from the glass."

Brennan looked confused.

"He escapes death. Last time, when Pelant tried to kill me, I escaped, and now, he wants me to be his disciple." Sweets added.

"Are you sure Pelant intended you to read the painting so deeply? You said yourself he was rushed." Brennan queried.

"There are thousands of images of Christ as a solo character. He could have picked from any one of them. The mourners are important." Sweets nodded, confident.

"What about the rest of them?" Brennan looked at the picture again.

"Well, these two? Mary Magdalene and the bearded servant with the jar? Angela and Hodgins."

"That jar most likely contains myrrh, the burial ointment, not insects." Brennan countered.

"A bearded guy holding a jar is not specific enough for you? Really? Okay...well, Joseph of Arimathea is the man at the crucifixion who was dying but, since he was a good and loyal disciple of Christ, gave up his tomb so that Christ could be laid there instead. It's a bit of a twist, but at the crime, _Wendell_ was lying in the position that _Booth _should have occupied, according to Pelant. So Wendell is Joseph of Arimathea."

Brennan looked intrigued now. "That means that Pelant has already begun to kill the people depicted in the painting."

"He's feeling wrathful." Sweets supplied.

"So who is Nicodemus?" Brennan asked.

"He's clearly an important figure, someone who supports Booth. Nicodemus was a holy man and spoke up for Jesus when he was arrested, saying 'Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?' So it's someone who supports Booth and loves the law. It could be Caroline but given the moral implications of the Jefferson quote, I'm inclined to believe it's Cam."

"She used to be a police officer." Brennan agreed.

"And she believes in the system." Sweets added. "Tyranny over the mind of man."

"And the rest?" Brennan asked.

Sweets exhaled a puff of air, still thinking. "The half-sisters and the young male servant are probably your interns."

"I have _five_ remaining interns: Ms Wick, Mr Fisher, Mr Vaziri, Mr Abernathy and Mr Wells. There are only three remaining characters in the picture."

"They could be representational." Sweets shrugged.

"No. Pelant is a code writer. He has a strong relationship with numbers. He would not have left indeterminacy in his message." Brennan argued.

Sweets clicked his fingers. "You're right. Who are your three favourite interns?"

"Favouritism is unprofessional." Brennan scolded.

"And I'm sure that you would never allow favouritism to cloud your professional judgment." Sweets indulged. "But come on, you must have favourites."

Brennan's suppressed smile told him he was right.

"Let me guess...Fisher? Daisy...and...Finn." Sweets said.

"They would be my favourites _now_." Brennan nodded soberly.

"Wendell was your third." Sweets winced. "Sorry."

Brennan sniffed. "Vincent Nigel-Murray was also my favourite. Two of them are gone now."

There was a pause while they both thought about that.

"If _you_ were uncertain as to who my favourite interns are, I don't see how Pelant could know." Brennan remarked.

"You're right. How would Pelant rank them?"

"Mr Fisher, Mr Vaziri and Mr Wells are the most promising." Brennan supplied.

"Who are the most uncompromisingly moral?" Sweets asked.

"Mr Vaziri, and Mr Abernathy."

"Then I'd guess the young male servant is Finn – and these two sisters signify Aristoo and Daisy."

"Why Daisy? She's neither moralistic nor religious." Brennan noted.

Sweets tried not to smart on her behalf. "Daisy idolises and rigidly emulates you – _that's_ her religion."

"And she's standing beside John the Evangelist." Brennan countered.

"That too."

"We should find a way to get your profiling to Booth." Brennan said, clearing away the dishes.

"Maybe we could get Max to deliver my notes? If there's anyone who can sneak in and out of D.C. without Pelant spotting him, it's Max."

"We can ask him when we get to Houston." Brennan agreed.

"I've been meaning to ask, where exactly in Houston are we going? Are we just going to drive around until we bump into somebody else with a disguise and a fake Texan accent?" Sweets joked.

Brennan gave him a playfully caustic stare. "I have an address."

"Care to share?" Sweets asked.

"Actually, no." Brennan teased. "I'm driving, so you'll have to wait and see."

She wondered whether it was wrong to engage in playful banter when Wendell had just been murdered, and she was far away from Booth and home. She did not want to be disloyal to Booth, but she could not help but feel that whatever it was that had been keeping him moody, detached and secretive for the last few months, his behaviour was a kind of disloyalty to her.

It had been good to laugh and smile, and to mull over a case with someone, even briefly. She showered with Christine, then put her to bed while Sweets was in the bathroom. Finally, he came out, damp from the shower, with only his gym pants on.

"I uh, forgot my shirt." He explained quickly, edging around the bed like a crab, looking for his night shirt without turning his back on Brennan. He saw it on the floor and bent to reach it, and Brennan realised why: the heat from the shower made his skin pink, creating contrast for the white keloid scar tissue that criss-crossed his back and part of his arms. Though he'd make frequent use of their tub when he'd stayed with them, she had never seen his back like this before.

"You don't have to cover those for my sake." Brennan said quietly as Sweets flushed with embarrassment, pulling the shirt over his head.

"I'm not. It just makes me feel a little exposed." Sweets reasoned. He turned off the lights and got into bed.

"Doesn't a reluctance to reveal your scars make intimate relations difficult?" Brennan asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

"Daisy knew about them." Sweets confided. "April too. As for short-term partners, you'd be surprised how long you can spend naked with someone without ever giving them a good view of your back." He smiled wryly.

Brennan smiled. Sexual humour she was well acquainted with.

"I understand the fear of exposure." Brennan said, rolling over onto her side so she could face Sweets in the darkness. "I had to practice exposing myself emotionally to one or two people at first, until I could accept the risk of exposing myself to a wider circle of friends at the Jeffersonian. Perhaps you could do the same thing with your scars? Allow yourself to go shirtless in front of Christine and I every now and then until it is no longer as frightening for you."

"Wouldn't you be worried about Christine seeing them?" Sweets asked.

"Why would I? There is nothing taboo or wrong about you, and the scars are a part of you."

Sweets swallowed.

"And what would you tell her if she asked about them?" he asked softly, scarcely trusting his voice.

"The truth. That not everyone in this world is a good person, and that sometimes, when people do battle with the bad people, they are left with scars."

"I'd hardly call 'being beaten' and 'doing battle' the same thing." Sweets muttered.

"You survived, Sweets. You use your own hurt to help other people. You don't think that's a kind of battle?"

Sweets was very quiet. Brennan had the worrying sensation come over her that if she could only see Sweets' eyes properly in the dim light, there would be tears in them.

Just as she was drifting off to sleep, he spoke: "Goodnight, Dr Brennan."

"Sleep well, Sweets."


	5. Chapter 5

Once again, Brennan and Christine were up and ready before him. Though he was groggy, it only took him five minutes to get ready, and another ten for he and Brennan to drain their coffees. He looked around with a pang of nostalgia at the dingy room, emptied of their things. Two days and it had already begun to feel...familiar.

While he was rinsing their coffee cups, Brennan grabbed his pack and exclaimed at what she saw poking out of it. "You're stealing the motel bible?"

Sweets blushed, and shrugged. "People's lives are at stake. We might need it as reference material if Pelant goes after any other Christian paintings."

"Isn't stealing a bible considered a second-order sin for the religious?"

"Well, I'm not actually religious, per se." Sweets countered, taking the pack back from Brennan.

She blinked, surprised.

"My Mom and Dad were, and I was raised Protestant...but organised religion never really did it for me. Depending on who I'm talking to, I describe myself as spiritual, or..."

"Agnostic." Brennan finished. "That's very sneaky of you."

Sweets scuffed the floor with his shoe. "Religion is a divisive topic. Why anger people if you don't have to?"

Brennan hurrumphed, and shutting the trunk of the car rather heavily before getting into the driver's seat.

He scampered to get in the passenger's side in case she took off without him.

"So, what is your position?" Brennan asked after driving in silence for a few miles.

"Excuse me?" Sweets blinked, thrown.

"On religion. What's your true position?"

He hesitated, knowing whatever he said would likely make it back to Booth. "I don't really know."

Brennan furrowed her eyebrows skeptically, but remained focused on the road.

Sweets sighed. "Fine. I don't believe in God, you know, as a man floating in the sky. But I do believe in a deep sense of connectedness between human beings and with the earth. I believe that when we put out positivity to the world, we get positivity back, and the same goes for negativity. I don't know if we go on in spirit after we die, but I do know we can leave a legacy of love and achievement amongst our peers on the earth which can survive our physical bodies."

"What you have described - except for the woolly part in the middle about karma - is essentially how I feel. Atheism is not just about the continual denouncing of a god, but about admiring the fineness of the natural world and of human experience."

"I thought that was secular humanism." Sweets prodded.

"Secular humanists are atheists." Brennan countered.

"The way squares are also rectangles." Sweets supplied.

Brennan gave an approving smile. "I don't think I've ever heard you make a geometry analogy before, Sweets."

"I have basic mathematical competency." Sweets grumbled. "Compared to some people I'd actually be _good_ at math."

"Just not compared to anyone we know." Brennan teased.

"Yeah well, even Angela's pretty damn good with numbers, so." Sweets conceded defeat. 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

Brennan was itchy to get to Texas where she could start investigating the Ghost Killer victim and feel useful again. Thus she refused to stop for more than five minutes, though she allowed Sweets to drive for a stretch when she felt herself getting fatigued.

"Don't you think we should stop by the next road-stop and have some lunch?" Sweets asked, hand tapping the steering wheel.

"We can eat lunch in the car. I made sandwiches."

"We can't go to the bathroom in the car." Sweets said pointedly.

"Oh. Are you experiencing discomfort?" Brennan said in what passed for tact in her personal dialect.

"If you don't let me urinate until we get to Texas, I have the feeling I might." Sweets said in a voice that implied his bladder was already under some pressure.

Brennan guffawed. "Okay, we can stop at the next place we see."

The next place was a gas station. They were cautious about cameras, but it was a tiny, day-operation, two-pump place that only had a camera on the till. Sweets despaired that they might not have a bathroom at all, but they were located out back.

Sweets took Christine out to use the facilities first, then kept the door ajar between them while he attempted to recreate Niagara Falls. Brennan was filling the tank so he went in to pay, and buy Christine a treat.

"Howdy." The middle-aged man behind the till was slouched against the wall, looking at a TV riveted in the back corner of the tiny shop.

Sweets grunted, nodding his head in 'Sam' mode, and crouched down in front of Christine. "Chrissy, what would you like? An ice-cream? A soda?"

Christine then glued herself to the sole refrigerator cabinet in the whole shop, eyes wide, so he let her have some fun browsing. He turned to watch the TV screen with the teller in a show of male camaraderie. The news was just ending.

"Them D.C. fellers been havin' a real hard time with that terrorist that trashes the monuments. You heard o' him?"

"The Presidents guy? Has he struck again?" Sweets felt a cold sweat come over him.

"Been on the news twice in two days." The older man said salaciously. "First, it's the Lincoln statue. Two years later, he's back for Jefferson. Then last night, he sneaks back in to the same crime scene and lays another body at Jefferson's feet like the cat that brung him a pigeon."

"You don't say." Sweets turned to the ice-cream cabinet and picked out three small buckets of ice-cream on autopilot. "Who was the third victim?"

"Another young man. Perhaps the killer's of a sodomite persuasion." The teller tapped his nose knowingly.

"It's un-American." Sweets stammered as he paid for the ice-cream and took Christine's hand.

The teller handed him the change. "Believe you me."

Sweets walked back to the car in a wobbly daze, only just keeping his knees from buckling under him, and Christine's hand in his.

The death confirmed two things for Sweets: first, that by using the same crime scene, Pelant was indicating that this new death was connected to Wendell's, so _The Descent from the Cross_ motif was likely still in play. Second, Pelant obviously hadn't found them, and he was angry. Killing off members of the Jeffersonian so quickly, back to back, was like burning through resources for someone like Pelant. This was obviously his endgame.

The endgame that Pelant had never intended to live through.

Brennan was not at the car, so she must have gone to use the bathroom. He strapped Christine in and gave her the ice-cream, wet-wipes on stand-by in the back seat.

If only he knew who the victim was! Then he'd know whether or not to tell Brennan. Booth wasn't exactly a _young _man, but in terms of TV generalisations...

When Brennan approached, she gave him such a genuine smile, that Sweets realised he had no choice. Sure, Brennan might want to bolt for home when he told her, but if he lied to her, or kept the secret, it would damage Brennan's very fragile sense of trust. She knew Booth was keeping something from her and it was destroying her. How would she cope if Sweets started doing it too?

He shut the door so Christine was sealed in the car, and wouldn't overhear their conversation.

"There's been a development. We need to get to a TV as soon as possible." Sweets told her.

Her face fell. "Another murder? Who?"

Sweets took a step towards her. "I don't know anything for sure. I didn't see the news, I was just chatting with the teller and he told me."

Brennan's head tilted and her expression was pained. "What did he say?" she begged.

"It was another young man. Found at the Jefferson Memorial."

Her eyes bugged out.

"It could be Aristoo or Finn..." he said, unable to believe himself that he was offering those options up like they might be a good thing.

"Or it could be _Booth_, Sweets! I have to go back." She sped around to the driver's door.

"It's a twelve-hour drive even if we take motorways." Sweets argued. "And it wouldn't matter if you could spirit us back there with a click of your fingers. If it _was_ Booth, there's already nothing you can do."

Brennan looked up at him bitterly, tears in her eyes. "That was an awful thing to say to me."

Sweets had teared up too. "But it's the _truth_!"

Seeing that Sweets was genuinely upset too calmed her a little. She took a deep breath. "We head south until we find a news outlet. Then if_ I_ decide we're going back, we're going back."

"Okay." Sweets agreed. "You alright to drive?"

"I'm fine." Brennan sat heavily in the car.

Sweets got in too. "I bought ice-cream."

Brennan turned around to survey the backseat. Christine was having a delightful time making a sticky mess. She turned back to see Sweets offering her a bucket and a plastic spoon.

"Pint for the road?" he offered without a hint of mirth.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Brennan had driven south for far longer than Sweets had expected. Perhaps part of her was afraid to confront the news which would confirm or deny her worst fears. Right now, Booth was rather like Schrödinger's cat – he was both living and dead.

Only, there was_ definitely_ a dead body under their box. It was only the victim's identity that remained uncertain. Sweets felt sure that Pelant wouldn't take out Booth so early in the game – if indeed, he was _capable_ of taking Booth out – but perhaps he had underestimated Pelant's rage – he would never have expected the murders to occur so closely together, either.

He liked to think that meant Pelant was unraveling.

_Why hadn't they anticipated this?_ He tortured himself. _Why hadn't they disbanded the whole Jeffersonian team, hidden them all away so Pelant would have had to content himself with killing random members of the public to get their attention?  
_  
But really, was it so much better to let Pelant kill faceless people than their friends? People who had their own co-workers and families and relationships?

The bottom fell out of Sweets' stomach as he wondered _Did Booth know this was going to happen? Was it a necessary sacrifice of troops to lure Pelant out? _No, Sweets reasoned. _This is the man who couldn't swap five stranger's lives for his own happiness. He would never have intentionally lined up the Jeffersonian staff like tin ducks at a shooting range.  
_  
Brennan looked at her watch. "We should find a motel and get settled in before the late news bulletin."

They found an appropriate motel in Longview, which was only a three-hour drive from Houston.

They were both withdrawn and Sweets blamed "Chrissy's grizzles" on the long drive when he booked them in. The young woman behind the counter was sympathetic, and let them get to their room without delay.

The room was definitely nicer, though the bed was smaller - walls and carpets pale blue and a television that looked like it had come off an assembly line sometime in the last twenty years. There was no cooking equipment, but there was a breakfast bistro in the complex. Besides, no matter what decision Brennan made, they had no plans to linger.

Sweets put Christine to bed while Brennan set up the TV and radio. "The D.C. Monument murders" were spit like a cherry pit into the radio news bulletin every now and then, but they didn't learn anything new. Brennan waited with the polaroid focused on the television.

"_Federal authorities were shocked this morning to discover that the Monument Killer had struck again – leaving another body posed at the Jefferson Memorial in our nation's capital. FBI sources have confirmed that both young male victims knew each other, and worked in criminal forensics at the Jeffersonian Institute_."

"There was no footage!" Brennan said in dismay, her hands cradling the camera to her chest.

"No. But we did learn one thing." Sweets prompted.

"The victim worked for the Jeffersonian. It's not Booth!" Brennan exclaimed, relieved. But then she stopped. "But Pelant killed another one of our friends. And we have no way of knowing which one."

"No, we don't." Sweets agreed sadly. He came up to her slowly, took the camera out of her hands, and set it on the table. "What do you want to do?"

"We've come this far. We can meet Max in Houston tomorrow." Brennan relented. "After that, we can decide."

If during the night, Brennan and Sweets found themselves holding each other, with Christine nestled between them, well, it was only because the bed was smaller. And if in the morning, each of them pretended to be asleep for a little bit longer before they stirred, it was only because the last four days had taken a physical toll. 


	6. Chapter 6

When they woke, the realities of the day before created a pervading air of misery surrounded them. Two of their friends were dead. They'd each had a taste of what it would be like if Booth were next.

They hardly spoke as they showered and dressed, packed the things they had barely unpacked, then headed to the bistro.

Brennan smiled for the first time since the night before when she realised Sweets had ordered the cheese and spinach omelette instead of his usual big breakfast.

"Were you serious about eliminating bacon from your diet?" she inquired.

Sweets looked down at his plate guiltily. "I just thought it might be easier, you know, sharing meals on the road, if I ate vegetarian for a while. It won't kill me." Sweets took a big bite of the omelette to prove it.

Brennan smiled again and said indulgently: "That's good of you Sweets." She added slyly "Should you find yourself wishing to experiment with vegetarian cooking when we get back, I'll show you how to make my quinoa salad that you liked so much."

He blushed, caught out. "I'd like that."

Sweets drove to Houston so that Brennan could navigate them to the address that she still refused to tell him. Sweets tried to wheedle it out of her just to pass the time.

"Max's first rule of being a fugitive is that sharing information is on a need-to-know basis."

"Well, I am the driver, I sort've _need to know_." Sweets griped.

The banter kept slipping, though. Not knowing who the latest victim was kept them in a state of quietly churning fear, compounded by the anticipation of seeing Max and planning the next leg of their journey.

Brennan thought to herself that this was the kind of tension she usually liked to relieve with sexual intercourse. Sadly, that option was not available.

The address Max had given Brennan turned out to be the back-room of a degenerate gambling hall. The place was probably run by a friend of Max's, Sweets guessed, and although he wondered whether it was a good location to bring a toddler, it was no doubt a place devoid of security cameras.

It was clearly not an establishment designed to be open in daylight hours, but on giving Max's name, a member of staff let them in a side-door from an alley, and they sat at a card table to wait.

Max didn't show for a couple of hours. Eventually Sweets asked Brennan if she wanted to play poker.

"Which style?"

"Texas Hold Em, naturally."

Sweets held the cards up close to his face, his dark eyes reading the cards, then looking over the brim of them at Brennan, secretively.

Brennan found poker to be a statistically reliable game, and smiled, reveling in the prospect of competition, but somehow, even when she had an excellent hand, she didn't win.

She threw down her eleventh hand in disgust. "You're too good at bluffing."

"Actually, it's more that you've got wicked obvious tells. When you're ace-high, you get a little crinkle, just here," Sweets pointed to his forehead "and anything better than two-of-a-kind, and your lip twitches."

Brennan scowled.

"Go on, call psychology a 'soft science' again. I love hearing you say that." Sweets taunted, playing with his rather large stack of chips.

An odd expression crossed Brennan's face. Perhaps she had figured out he was trying to distract her from grief, or perhaps it was something else altogether. "We should play a different game." Was all she said.

"What did you have in mind?" Sweets asked.

But before Brennan could answer, Max opened a back door and crossed the felt flooring of the games room. "Kiddo!" he yelled, and Christine ran towards him. Max swung her up in the air, and walked over with her in his arms, standing her on a chair.

"Hello pumpkin, Dr Sweets." Max nodded, his eyes gleaming in that overly-friendly and slightly predatory way he had when he was involved in something illicit.

Sweets noticed him scanning the exits and wondered worriedly exactly how good a friend the owner of the establishment was.

"Have you got information for us?" Brennan asked.

"I do. The files are in your car. Well, your new car."

"Max..." Brennan said judgmentally.

"You've been driving the same one for almost a week! It's not safe." Max justified. "Besides, I left the owners a better car than I took."

Sweets eyes boggled as he realised it was stolen, but he said nothing. To her credit, neither did Brennan. She must have justified a lot of similar things when she was hiding with him before.

"You've heard about the murders?" Brennan asked.

"Yes honey, I have." he shot her a sideways glance. "As it happens, I saw Booth not long ago." Max bounced Christine up and down on the chair, trying to ignore the outraged look his daughter's face.

"You _both_ told me you were going to leave D.C. at the same time we did." Brennan was hurt.

"Well, I _did_. I went to Virginia and snooped around about that girl you asked me to look into."

"Chloe Campbell?" Sweets turned on her. "_Now_ who's keeping secrets?"

Brennan shot him a guilty look.

Max continued: "Then I went back to D.C. and met up with Booth after the first murder. He's got some photos of that Wendell kid for you." Max looked sympathetic. "I heard about the Southern boy on the radio."

"Finn." Brennan breathed.

Brennan's shoulders sank.

Sweets wondered how Max had really come across this information, since they'd been listening in too, and no station he'd heard had described the victim. Possibly criminal connections.

But something else had obviously occurred to Brennan. She shifted her weight and gave her father a look of ice-blue fury.

"Booth was using himself as _bait_!" Brennan's eyes brimmed with angry tears. "You were the contingency plan. He expected to be the first target. If he was killed, _you_ were going to take out Pelant in his place."

A guilty expression crossed Max's face. "It wasn't quite like that. Let me explain..."

"No! Booth knew that he could _fail_, that he could _die_, and he sent me away without telling me." Brennan raged.

"Well, would you have left him if he told you?" Max reasoned.

"Of course not!" Brennan was horrified.

Max gave a sorry little half-smile. "Then, you see why we had to lie to you."

"How could you both expect me to leave him to _die_?"

"Booth didn't want to risk any more innocent people. Someone had to lure the little weasel out of hiding. So he took some risks. But, the plan backfired. Pelant didn't take the bait, which is not so good for your little friends, but Booth is okay. That's the important thing, isn't it?"

"I can't talk to you right now." Brennan stormed off towards the door.

"Dr Brennan!" Sweets called out, panicked. "We can't split up!"

"Go after her." Max said. "I'll take care of Christine. I've got us a room here." Max threw a motel room key at him with a card dangling off it that read _Shady Palms_ with an address printed below.

Sweets ran to catch up with Brennan, who was already disappearing round the block in this rather seedy part of town. He was glad he'd run track and field in high school – he was panting hard by the time he caught up to her.

"Where's Christine?" Brennan asked, still power-walking, not looking at him.

"Max has got her. He'll keep her safe."

Brennan snorted.

"Where are we going?" Sweets tried, struggling to keep up.

"_I_ am going to have a drink." She announced.

The bar and walls of the shady-looking place Brennan picked were trimmed in some awful maroon velvet which had been eroded and stained by beer spills over the years. A giant set of buffalo horns was mounted over the bar, a frankly alarming phallic statement, Sweets thought to himself. It was gloomy inside, and most of the patrons were not at this end of the bar, but down the far side watching cable sports. It was clearly the kind of place where the locals were lined up at 10am waiting to get in.

Brennan sidled up and ordered a whiskey.

"What're you havin'?" The hairy Texan native behind the bar was already looking him up and down like he didn't belong.

"Beer. A cheap beer." Sweets couldn't order a cocktail in a place like this. He also couldn't drink spirits – one of them had to keep a clear head and Brennan obviously wasn't going to be that person.

The bartender only grunted, pulled the beer, and shuffled down to watch the sports.

Brennan tossed back the whiskey like it was Sprite and reached across the bar, helping herself to another and sitting the bottle between them on the table.

"Did Booth tell you his plan, too?" Brennan accused him.

"No, he didn't." Sweets looked her in the eye. "To be honest, though, I should have realised."

"What does that mean?" Brennan said, asking her glass as much as her companion. "He says we're the most important people to him, but he doesn't tell either of us. He says he loves me, but he won't marry me, and he won't tell me why. How can he love me without trusting me?"

"That's the way Booth loves people. By protecting them." Sweets said, taking a mouthful of his god-awful beer.

"I don't _want_ to be loved that way." Brennan yelled, frustrated.

Someone hooted in their direction from the other end of the bar.

Someone else said "You tell 'im, darlin'."

Brennan lowered her voice. "I can protect myself."

"You know Booth trusts you." Sweets admonished.

"He used to. When we were partners, out in the field. But ever since we had Christine, when the work gets dangerous, he sends me back to the lab or out of harm's way."

"You're parents now. It's more important that one of you survive." Sweets reasoned.

"He used to believe that if we were together, we'd _both _survive!" Brennan burst. "Now, Booth sees me not as his partner, but as his _mate_: a very beloved dependent but not an equal." She looked up at Sweets defiantly. "I can _take_ a bullet. I can _keep_ a secret."

"I know you can." Sweets said, holding up his palms in surrender.

She turned to look at him as though he might be the enemy. "There's a reason feminism and chivalry don't co-exist." Brennan drained the glass. "When a man opens a door for a woman, it's symbolic of his superiority. _He_ will open the door because _she_ is weaker. _He_ will fix the plumbing because _she_ is weaker. _He_ will take the bullet because _she_ is weaker. _He_ will keep the secrets because _she_ is weaker."

Sweets was desperately trying to think of a way to defend Booth, but even though it was a caricature, Brennan had in essence captured Booth's worldview.

Brennan threw back another glass. "It's not going to work."  
She said it very, very quietly, but Sweets heard her.

She turned to look at him.

"When Pelant contacted you, and told you not to tell anyone, what did you do?"

Sweets closed his eyes. "I told Booth."

"And when Booth asked, I told everyone that Pelant had contacted me. But still _he_ said nothing."

She poured some more whiskey.

"I am quantifiably a genius, Sweets. Don't you think I _realised_ Pelant must have had something to do with Booth turning me down?"

"If you knew it was Pelant, why didn't you say anything?" Sweets cried.

"Because _Booth_ should have told me!" Brennan thundered.

Her eyes narrowed as she examined Sweets' guilty face. "You knew, too. Booth told _you_, didn't he?"

Sweets looked panicked and torn. "I...uh...no, not at first! Look, he told me just before he left. If Booth didn't turn you down, Pelant was going to kill five random people. And if you looked...too happy, then he'd know Booth had told you why, and he'd kill the people anyway. But I know he's never wanted anything more than he wants to marry you." Sweets rushed, his voice pleading." It's been a huge burden for him."

"Clearly, Booth trusts _you_! Maybe you should marry him." she said viciously.

She threw her drink in Sweets' face and stormed out.

He wiped his face to a chorus of hoots from the other end of the bar. Throwing the money down on the counter, Sweets chased after her.

_He had to stay with her_.

He'd only had the one beer, but he wasn't used to drinking in the day, so he felt disoriented. He turned left and right, but he couldn't see Brennan. Panicking, he tried to predict where she might go.

She's feeling betrayed by all the men in her life. He reasoned. _Another bar_.

He worked methodically through the dive bars that were in walking distance from the place they'd been drinking, getting more and more choked up. She'd drunk half a bottle of whiskey so her risk assessment wasn't going to be great. _She could get spotted by Pelant's surveillance. She could get alcohol poisoning. She could get into a barfight._ He imagined Brennan getting glassed in the face, an image his childhood memories had helpfully thrown up for him. _She could get lost. Hit by a car. And then this whole ordeal would mean nothing.  
_

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It took him three hours to find her.

He was exhausted, spiking adrenaline and relief when the bartender told him a blonde lady matching the description he'd given had been hassling other customers by the dartboards.

He'd been rehearsing how he might apologise to her once he'd found her, how he might talk her into returning to the motel, but in all the scenarios he'd run through, he hadn't predicted this.

Brennan was _sloppy_ drunk.

And _really_ happy to see him.

"Baby Duck!" she exclaimed nonsensically, stumbling over her feet to get to him. She threw her arms around him, at first, Sweets thought, to steady herself, but then she pulled him closer, running her hands suggestively over his body.

"You found me at the Duck Inn, Baby Duck!"He tried to shift her hands up to his shoulders but those pesky little suckers kept heading south. "Quack!"

"Dr Brennan..." Suddenly, he was so mad with her. He'd been terrified out of his mind today that he'd screwed up. That he'd broken something important and Brennan was somewhere, suffering, because of him. He'd hated himself.

And here she was, grinning and playing seductress. _Like nothing was wrong_.

She reached up and batted Sweets' pout with one finger, oblivious to his serious, scowling face.

"You know, Sweets? Sometimes I wish you weren't a baby..."

He surprised them both by grabbing her and kissing her. Passionately. Desperately. For a whole lot of tug boats. Willing her with every fibre of his being to understand what she meant to him, how scared he'd been.

They held onto each other for a moment after, Sweets staring into Brennan's eyes.

"I've wanted you to do that this whole time." She said simply.

Then she slumped forward, unconscious.

Sweets silently congratulated himself for the effect he had on women.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sweets had to risk hailing a cab to take them to the _Shady Palms_. They had no car with them, and Brennan wasn't in any state to walk.

Room 22 turned out to be a two-bedroom suite with a lounge-room and kitchenette decked out in the best lime, orange and brown tones the seventies had to offer. Brennan was tucked against him, just able to move with his momentum, but not conscious enough to plan actions for herself.

Sweets quietly thought this was a miracle because he didn't think he could have shepherded her if she was fighting him.

"What the hell happened to you two?" Max reached for his daughter upon opening the door.

"A lot of whiskey." Sweets muttered.

Together, they edged her into one of the bedrooms. Sweets began to unlace her shoes.

"Why didn't you stop her?" Max groused, getting her a glass of water from the ensuite and grabbing the plastic rubbish pail to double as a sick bucket.

"She's a grown woman. What was I supposed to do, tackle her?" Sweets snarked.

"If you had to."

Sweets tucked a pillow behind Brennan's head, brushing her fringe out of her eyes so it wouldn't tickle while she slept. "Where's Christine?"

"There's a crib and a bed in the other room. I'll bunk in there with her if you don't mind taking the lounge."

Sweets glanced at the space beside Brennan in the double bed, but figured even if she didn't remember when she sobered up _why_ she wanted to kill him, she'd appreciate the space.

They left Brennan's door open a crack. Max went to the kitchenette and brought over two cups of coffee. Sweets wistfully turned his back on Brennan and flopped on the lounge, putting his socked feet on the coffee table, exhausted, before taking a sip.

Neither of them had eaten since breakfast, he recalled.

"Long day, huh?" Max inquired.

"The longest." Sweets sighed. There was no sugar in his coffee, but he couldn't be bothered getting up to get any.

"Is she _that_ mad at me?" Max asked.

"She's mad with all of us. Booth especially." Sweets looked down into his cup.

"I see." Max sipped his own drink thoughtfully. "You really care about her, don't you?"

"What makes you say that?" Sweets asked quietly.

"You know kid, you've got a terrible poker-face for a psychologist." Max laughed. "I see the way you look at her. But you know when all this is over, she's going back to Booth, and her home in D.C, and Christine is going back to her father."

He was laying it out like the facts of life, trying to be kind, but Sweets also heard the warning: _She's got a perfect little life, kid, don't mess it up.  
_  
"I've wanted Booth and Brennan to be together for longer than _they_ have." Sweets pointed out flatly. He was too tired to be intimidated by Max, and frankly, if Booth and Brennan and the whole Jeffersonian team had descended on him in that second to tell him what a terrible friend he was, he wouldn't have had the energy or the inclination to argue.

_Booth is my best friend. And I kissed his girl._

_Then again,_ a little voice said, _she kissed you back_.

He hushed that voice aggressively and put his head in his hands. He was not supposed to be a home wrecker; he counseled people for God's sake. He groaned. "This has been the most stressful week of my life. And we haven't even made it to Sunday."

Max just smiled and drank his coffee. Sweets stared up at his haggard profile and figured he must have had more than one week like this, given the life he had led.

Max took Sweets' cup and washed it along with his own. "Get some sleep."


	7. Chapter 7

Sweets was just a little too long to fit comfortably on the couch, but after all the running around he had done, sleep found him easily.

He fell into a dream that rapidly became a nightmare.

_Booth was beating Christine. Brennan was cringing in the corner, screaming at Booth to stop, and occasionally he picked something up and threw it at her, a book or a some crockery, bits sometimes shattering and raining down onto Brennan's face.  
_  
_Sweets wandered through the scene and its dreary tea-yellow light as though he were drugged. Unable to stop Booth. Or reach Brennan. Or help Christine._

"Did you call him 'Daddy'?" he pointed at Sweets. He lashed at Christine with his "Cocky" belt, and she howled. "Did you?"  
"It was my fault, Booth." Brennan cried, throat hoarse. "Hit me. Don't take it out on her."

"Stop it, Booth!" he wanted to say, but his mouth couldn't form words.  
The belt came down. Christine howled again.  


"Sweets." Brennan was perched on the armrest of the lounge. "You were having a nightmare."  
She was rubbing at his shoulder gently, as he had done for her two nights ago. On realising he was awake, she drew back.

Sweets propped himself up on his elbows groggily. "Did I wake you?"

"No, purging my body of a bottle of whiskey woke me." She said glumly.

"How's your head?"

"I'm suffering the typical effects of mild alcohol poisoning: balance defects, dehydration, confusion."

He asked flatly: "How much do you remember?"

"I have a very good memory, Sweets, even inebriated." Brennan said caustically.

He scrubbed at the back of his head. "Are you mad?"

"That depends, Sweets. Are you asking if I'm mad that you helped my boyfriend lie to me, even though you _knew_ how much pain the deceit caused me? Or are you asking if I'm mad that you kissed me while I was barely conscious?"

Sweets winced. "Yeah, about that. I'm sorry. For both things, I mean. I...I was so glad I'd managed to find you again, it was the heat of the moment."

She hesitated, on the armrest.

"You know, you're just as bad as he is sometimes." Brennan said.

"As who is?"

"Booth. There's always a good reason for what he does. But the lying and the sneaking and the lies by omission? They have real, human consequences. The end doesn't justify the means." She eyed Sweets sternly.

"Dr Brennan, I know I should have encouraged Booth to tell you about Pelant, or told you myself that he bogarted your proposal earlier, but I _swear_ I haven't been keeping anything else from you." Sweets looked pained.

"You talk in your sleep, you know."

Sweets froze. That was the last thing he expected her to say.

"Not just tonight," she added. "You've done it every night this week."

Sweets edged cautiously into the upright position. The luminescent clock on the kitchenette's microwave read 5:03.

"It would appear there are things on your mind which you don't talk about." Brennan persisted.

"What did I say?" Sweets looked up into Brennan's eyes, trying to decide what kind of test this was.

_Sometimes you cry out in pain, begging and whimpering. Sometimes you give out cognitive therapy techniques. Sometimes you talk to your Mom or Dad...you're in so much pain and you never tell me._

"You mention Christine a lot." She said.

"I worry about her wellbeing." Sweets said slowly. "What else?"

"You call out to me." Brennan said. Her brow furrowed, like she was wincing from the memory of his voice. "Sometimes it sounds like you want to save me, and sometimes it sounds like you want me to save you."

Sweets' sighed, and his head drooped for a moment.

Then he looked up, exasperated. "What do you want me to say? Do you want me to share all the demons from my past with you? Be honest with you even when you're not completely honest with me?"

"I _am_ honest with you." Brennan insisted.

"That's why you felt the need to lie to me about working on the Ghost Killer case behind Booth's back. Why you've told me so much about _your_ past." Sweets said sardonically.

"Most of the time I don't _need_ to tell you. I just _let you in_ and you _see_." Brennan implored.

Sweets squeezed his eyes shut and hid his hand behind his eyes for a moment. "No. Honest communication doesn't work like that. The words _matter_, sometimes." He looked back up at Brennan.

"Think what you're asking of me. You want me to tell you how much I've always wanted to fall in love, to be part of a real family. Wanted it so much that I freaking _proposed_ to Daisy. Only to realise that I might _actually_ have done it, this time, fallen in love, but it's with the worst possible person. Because if I pursue her, I lose most of my friends and the only place I've ever belonged."

Brennan started forward like she wanted to comfort him.

Sweets held up his hand to make her listen. "You're asking me to do that, and you won't even be honest about how _you_ feel about me."

Brennan was weighed down by the accusation.

"You were in on that kiss. You suspect your feelings towards me are changing and that's hugely complicated for your personal life so you're too damned scared to even admit it to yourself, let alone tell _me_ about it."

"But you already _know_!" Brennan pleaded.

"That's not the same thing as you telling me!" There were sparks flying behind Sweets' eyes and his expression was raw.

Brennan swallowed. _Had she done the same thing to Sweets that Booth had done to her?_

"I'm afraid." Her voice was thick with tears. "Afraid of change."

Sweets, tilted his jaw at her, clearly pissed.

"Yeah, well, so am I."

Sweets lay down and turned his back on Brennan, as if he intended to go back to sleep.

He heard her silently retreat.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Max was up early, making scrambled eggs and coffee for everyone. The kid was in the shower. Brennan and Christine were playing on the lounge. So he was a little taken aback when Sweets brushed by him in only a towel.

"Morning." He said, nodding shortly to Max, and disappearing into Brennan's room to get clothes out of his pack.

But Max hadn't registered much else beyond the horrific scars on the kid's back.  
He carried the coffees over. "Was Sweets in the slave trade or something?" he hissed, keeping his voice low.

"Oh, the scars?" Brennan asked. "Sweets suffered abuse as a child in the Foster system."

"_You _were in the foster system." Max said worriedly, looking from his daughter to the door where Sweets had disappeared.

"My foster parents weren't as bad as Sweets'." Brennan said, picking up a newspaper. She was secretly pleased. She had been worried about confronting those expressive brown eyes this morning, worried she would see anger or betrayal behind them, or, worse, that shuttered look that told her he was keeping her out. When Sweets had walked out of the bathroom shirtless, she'd read it as a secret signal that despite their pre-dawn conversation, they were still friends; he was taking her advice.

He reappeared in brown jeans and faded white T-shirt, and started eating his eggs in mid-air. He hovered near her without sitting down, making chit-chat with Max.

After breakfast, they settled Christine in front of some Saturday morning children's shows, and took their evidence collection into Brennan's bedroom.

"I took the liberty of transferring all your stuff to the new car, by the way. It's parked downstairs, light-blue Toyota."

Brennan and Sweets exchanged glances.

"What, you can drive stick, can't you, kid?"

Sweets nodded, trying not to be insulted.

"It's fine, thank you Max." Brennan intervened. "What did you find out about Chloe Campbell?"

"She was an events coordinator for Turcell Holdings. Family came from New England, nice looking girl by all accounts. The night she disappeared she was working a joint-function at the Caraway Hotel for Build Corp and the McNamara Group. They were promoting their new eco-village sub-divisions."

Max took a sip of his coffee. "Couldn't find too many people who could remember the function – a hotel has a lot of turn-over in fourteen years – but one of her colleagues at Turcell remembered she'd had an argument in the kitchens because the shrimp the caterers served was bad."

Sweets jotted everything Max had said down in his casebook, while Max handed Brennan a manila envelope full of crime-scene photos. She lost no time in spreading them out on the bed.

Wendell's eyeless, bloodied skull rested on the exposed muscle of his right bicep. His ribcage was splayed and flayed, and what looked to be an industrial bolt was driven through his feet, holding them together.

"Those are from Booth. He says Angela identified a Renaissance painting it was modeled on."

"_The Descent of the Cross_ by van der Wayden." Brennan murmured, engrossed in the images.

"That's the one."

"I've actually got some profiling notes about Pelant's use of the painting that I'd like Booth to have." Sweets told Max. "Is there any way you could get them to Booth for us?"

"I thought I was staying with you two." Max said brightly.

"We thought you might have an alternative way of communicating with him." Sweets said, although he and Brennan had not discussed any such thing, she was too distracted by the crime scene photos to protest.

"Nope." Max said. "Just the Wagon Trail." 

Sweets eyed him closely. If he was not in communication with Booth, he must be getting his information from the criminal underground. He wondered if they had web communities or something. 

Brennan looked up from the images. "It's very important that Booth and the team get Sweets' profiling, otherwise they'll read the significance of the tableau incorrectly. Each mourner in the image represents one of the team members at the Jeffersonian. It may help Booth discern who may be targeted next."

Max raised his eyebrows that his calculated, empirically-driven daughter was putting so much stock in the psychologist's profiling.

Sweets took it as a secret signal of his own.

"Right ribs five through seven are pierced along the shaft in injuries that are congruent with those depicted in Van der Wayden's painting." Brennan noted, holding out a magnifying glass. "There's also something here...the trauma and staining in the fractures of the tarsals. They indicate that the nail was driven through Wendell's feet while he was still alive, and tearing suggests that weight was suspended from the injury."

"Pelant really crucified him?" Sweets asked, aghast.

"It's possible." Brennan concluded. "I wish I could see the actual remains. There's nothing visible at this resolution that I wouldn't expect my interns to find..."

"Well, here's the kicker." Max broke in. "The intern who was working with Dr Edison on Wendell's case..."

"Was Finn Abernathy." Sweets guessed.

"Yeah." Max said flatly.

"Perhaps Mr Abernathy saw something on the bones that Pelant couldn't risk being discovered." Brennan said, animated. "Something that would lead us to his workstation."

She looked about ready to race back to D.C. to report this idea until Max said: "Yeah. I bet that was Booth's first guess too."

"What do you know about Finn's murder?" Sweets asked Max.

"Not much. He was found in the Jefferson Memorial, his arms slung around the statue. He'd been dragged into the upright position using some kind of nylon."

Sweets furrowed his brow. "I'd heard the body was placed at the statue's feet. Was it like this?"  
He pointed to the servant on the ladder.

"Well, I didn't see the corpse, but yeah, it could look a bit like that." Max conceded.

"This confirms my theory. Pelant is going to pick off every character in the tableau, leaving the major figures, Booth, Dr Brennan, and myself for last. He seems to be targeting those with rigidly applied moral codes, so it's my belief that the next target will be Aristoo."

"Wasn't Wendell supposed to represent Christ? It's been a while since church, but he's a pretty _major figure_ in the resurrection." Max argued.

"No, _Booth _is Christ, _Wendell_ is Joseph of Arimathea, and_ I'm_ the Virgin Mary." Brennan said like it was all completely obvious.

"I see, she's got the little bones." Max humoured her.

Brennan gave him a wan smile. "We believe Aristoo and Daisy are signified by two half-sisters. Aside from remaining consistent with the pattern Pelant is creating from the tableau, the more interns Pelant kills, the less people there are to work on his victims. If he killed them all, eventually I'd be forced to return to the lab."

"Good point." Max responded much better to Brennan's pragmatic arguments than psychology.

"It's all written here." Sweets handed him a hurriedly transcribed version of his profiling. "It's important to stress the moral emphasis of Pelant's targets, which ties directly into the quote in the Jefferson Memorial.'

Max frowned. "But Abernathy, he was a petty crim before he worked at the Jeffersonian wasn't he? Suspected of killing his old man?"

Brennan turned to scowl at him. "Mr Abernathy was a victim of child abuse, guilty only of youthful misdemeanours. He held personal integrity in very high regard."

"Besides, Max," Sweets sparred, "You should know better than anyone that just because people _think_ you're immoral, it doesn't mean you are."

"Says the man who called me a sociopath under oath." Max grumbled.

Sweets put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. "I calls 'em like I sees 'em."

Finally, Max agreed to take Sweets' findings to Booth. He gave Brennan a list of meet-up points and times, just in case either of them got waylaid. It was system they had used before and Brennan only gave the list a cursory glance before tucking it into her things.

"I'll be back in less than forty-eight hours." Max said, as much to Sweets as to Brennan. "So no funny business while I'm gone."

Sweets looked him in the eyes and nodded. Brennan huffed out a laugh, not aware that they were talking about anything other than her recent bout of drinking.

"Do you have any messages for Booth, honey?" Max prompted.

"Tell him...Christine misses him." Brennan said finally.

Max's face sobered, but he dutifully pulled the door of Room 22 of the _Shady Palms_ motel closed behind him.


	8. Chapter 8

Booth wasn't usually in his office on a Saturday morning, but then, he usually had a family to go home to. Even though his office at the FBI wasn't a place he could hide from Pelant's surveillance, it was a place where he could work without the threat of being ambushed and strung up in the Jefferson Memorial.

It was quiet. The weekend accounted for most of that, but it was also the absence of a certain goofy FBI profiler that was starting to get to Booth. He was used to having a partner to bounce ideas off of, and he'd sent both his partners away.

It was hard to feel _too_ down this morning though. Booth remembered the little boon they'd had last night with a grin.

Someone had tried to grab Aristoo during a B&E at his apartment around 1:30 am. The masked assailant had been carrying a delivery stick for a paralytic injection, but was clearly unaware – as the majority of the team had been – that Aristoo was a trained martial artist. He grabbed the stick and used it like a Dragon Pole to beat the assailant, who disappeared out a window. He was fairly sure he had broken the assailant's nose.

In response to Aristoo's report on the incident, Booth had been able to secure extra funding that morning to double the police detail on the crime scene, and each on member of the Jeffersonian team, including Dr Edison and Caroline. If Pelant wanted to take out another member of their little family, well, the only person not under lock and key was Booth.

Suddenly, his phone rang.

"There's a courier in the lobby with something for you." Pelant thickly said by way of greeting.

"Your voice sounds a little funny, there, Pelant. You got a head cold?" Booth deadpanned.

"Everybody makes mistakes." Pelant said, without a hint of humility in his tone.

The confidence in Pelant's voice stirred Booth's spidey senses. _He was up to something._

"Have you sent me a bomb? What, given up on the challenge of skewering me yourself?" Booth taunted.

"It's not a bomb, Agent Booth. If I was going lose the artistic touch, I could have blown you all up months ago. It's just a couple of pictures you might find interesting."

_God no. He found them._

Booth sweated while he instructed the courier to halt, and took the envelope from him.

"See, I was having trouble finding Lance and Temperance." Pelant gloated. "Even the NSA facial recognition software yielded nothing...until last night. If, even with their combined IQ, Lance and Temperance can get caught on candid camera by a strip-mall _7-Eleven_ in Texas, then I don't feel so bad about not anticipating an Arab who knows Kung Fu."

Booth tore open the envelope. Three black and white camera stills showed Sweets, clutching Bones to him, walking outside a seedy bar district. Bones' head was pressed against his shoulder. In two of the shots, Sweets was looking around for something, but in the third, he was looking down at Bones, and there was no mistaking the look of concern and adoration on his face.

Booth's mouth dropped open.

"See, Booth, everyone makes mistakes. I underestimated Mr Vaziri. Lance and Temperance underestimated me. And it appears you've underestimated Lance and Temperance."

Pelant chuckled.

"I know you didn't want _me_ to have her, but is Dr Lance Sweets, mild-mannered psychologist, really any better?"

Booth hung up the phone. He rang up someone from the bullpen to question the courier, then shunted them both out of his office so he could pace.

Sweets had said himself that Pelant thought the two of them were alike. He'd also said that Pelant wanted nothing more than to replace Booth and claim Bones as his girl. Is that what _Sweets_ had wanted too?

More likely this was a Pelant set-up. He'd never found Bones and these photos were a computer-generated fake. Or maybe he had found them but had photoshopped the images somehow.

All Booth's sense of victory was suddenly drained.

He was going to have to make a phone call that he really didn't want to make.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Angela was not as stiff when she greeted him as she usually was. Booth took that to be a bad sign.

The three images of Bones and Sweets were blown up on the screen in her office.

"I've run all the diagnostics I can, and, as far as I can see, the photos are genuine. The only way they could be faked is if Pelant had somehow sourced and photographed Sweets' and Brennan's dopplegangers."

"It's them." Booth said solemnly. Bones was wearing those little high ponytails that were part of her disguise. Pelant had never seen them.

"So Brennan and Sweets are in Texas, huh?" Angela said.

That she was trying to make conversation with him, since she hadn't been _talking_ to him since the proposal-that-wasn't, was also a bad sign.

"I don't know where they are." Booth said. "We had no way of keeping in contact."

Angela nodded slowly. "You know, you shouldn't let Pelant fill your head with rubbish just because Sweets has some cute little puppy-dog crush on Brennan. He had a crush on me too for a while, and Hodgins knew. He didn't think the sky was falling in because it's _Sweets_. And it's not like Brennan is looking back at him in that picture."

Booth swallowed, and nodded. "Thanks, Angela."

"Hey, when all this Pelant craziness is over, you are gonna propose to her right?" Angela said, one hand on her hip.

"Right." Booth said weakly.

"You better. Don't make me regret being nice to you, G-Man." Angela smiled as he walked out the door.

_Angela had forgiven him. That was not a good sign at all._

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Booth jumped when he heard a sharp rap on his door, and only loosened his grip on his gun when he realised it was the signal knock. Max was back?

"It's the middle of the night." Booth complained as he opened the door in his robe and boxers.

"Desperate times." Max shrugged. "Can I come in?"

Booth let the door swing open, and apparently that was the most welcoming invitation he was going to get at that time of night. Especially since Booth had nursed his concerns to sleep that evening with a couple of fingers of scotch.

"Are they alright?" Booth asked.

"Tempe and Christine send their love." Max gave a twinkling smile. "Tempe and the kid have got a few theories for you too." He slapped the sheets of paper into Booth's hands.

Booth found it odd that even the sight of Sweets' handwriting was making him feel queasy. He tried to reconcile the baby-faced kid, always so eager to please him, with the look he'd given Brennan in that still. He couldn't. There had never been anything between them _before_, he would have noticed it.

_Something must have changed on the road._

But that was an absurd thought. They'd been gone less than a week.

When he made himself read through Sweets' profiling of the recent murders though, he had to whistle. "He's on the money – Pelant tried to nab Aristoo last night." Booth said.

"Tried?" Max raised his eyebrows hopefully.

"He got away. Aristoo broke his nose though." Booth smiled.

"Good." Max said. "I'd like to break more than that. The snivelling little bastard crucified Wendell alive, Tempe said."

"Yeah, Dr Edison told me." One of those fingers of scotch had been for Wendell.

"So, did you get to the part where you're Christ and Wendell was just a decoy?" Max pressed.

"Yep. According to this though, I'm third-last on the hit-list, so I guess I can get comfy." Booth said darkly, slumping into his chair.

"Something got you down, son? More than the murders I mean." Max said.

"Yeah. I got a phone call from Pelant today. He found our fugitives. You been to Texas lately, Max?"

Max froze.

"Pictures are on the table." Booth said.

Max walked over slowly, afraid of what he was going to find.

_It was just a quick set of shots that represented no more than five minutes of real time – Pelant had no doubt got lucky – but what a five-minute set to pick! With Brennan's head on the kid's shoulder and him staring down at her like she was Helen of Troy._ Max stifled a groan.

"Anything you want to tell me, Max?" Booth scowled.

"Don't read too much into it. The kid's got a little crush on Tempe. But he respects boundaries. He knows what you're doing for her and who she's coming home to."

_That means you've talked about it._ Booth thought. _Definitely not good.  
_  
"Yeah, well, Pelant may have me pegged as Christ, but I'm starting to feel more like King Arthur." Booth said poisonously.

Max's reply was interrupted when Booth got another call on his phone.

It was from dispatch.

"Damn it!" He snapped his phone shut and turned to Max. "The police officers at the scene were all gassed and lost consciousness. When they woke, they found another body in the memorial."


	9. Chapter 9

Sweets, Brennan and Christine left _Shady Palms_ in their light-blue Toyota not long after Max.

They were on a case, which made it easier to ignore all the sentiment of the night before and focus on the tasks ahead. Sweets could see from the nervous crease around Brennan's eyes that she just wanted things to be okay – to go back to normal.

He was prepared to give that to her.

"It won't be difficult to get out onto the greens," Brennan said over her shoulder as she drove. "but locating the exact spot that the body was recovered from, and performing a thorough excavation of the site will no doubt be more challenging."

"What will you say if someone catches you?"

Brennan shrugged. "I'll tell them I'm a gardener."

"No offense, but you're the wrong colour to be a gardener in a golf club in _this _part of the world." Sweets said sardonically. "And gardeners don't usually bring their kids with them to work."

"It is a Saturday. And adequate day care must be difficult to obtain for the working classes." Brennan looked in her rear-view mirror.

"Uh, Yeah. Sometimes I forget, you're not just rich, but _super-rich_. It must be such a pain, having to come down from lofty heights and mingle with the proletariat." Sweets rolled his eyes.

"You're hardly a member of the proletariat, Dr Sweets." Brennan reminded him. "I work with my hands more often than you do."

"Yeah, I guess it's hard to complain when your profession's weapon of choice is a couch." Sweets smiled lazily. "Besides, I'm prudently invested."

"Daisy mentioned that you were extremely talented with finances. Perhaps you could take a look at my portfolio sometime?" Brennan asked.

"Sure." Sweets said, his voice registering a little higher than he would have liked.

_How does she manage to make finances sound like a euphemism?_ He wondered.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They stopped at a public bathroom so Brennan and he could change into their disguises.

"You do look a bit like a gardener." Sweets conceded. Although, he thought privately, her gardener's costume was more like an outfit one might use to 'establish the storyline' in an eighties porno._  
_  
She was wearing _very _short army-green shorts and old runners, a white shirt-blouse and a tight khaki vest that accented her cleavage. Her hair poked out from an absurdly wide-brim hat and she was wearing outdoorsy gloves. Somehow those details made her look even hotter. Her travel kit was slung over her shoulder. He imaged her saying _I have come to clip the roses..._ in a breathy voice before scolding himself and dismissing the thought.

She was surveying him too.

He had changed into a white polo-shirt, a pair of long taupe shorts, white socks and runners, and was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses. He looked slightly dorky, but in the entitled way of rich college kids. He was already working on the character with the cocky way he stood and moved. Brennan noticed that little arrogance looked good on Sweets.

It had been his suggestion that infiltrate the golf club and snoop around while she was working.

"Do you even know how to play golf?" She asked critically.

"I know the basics." Sweets countered. "Besides, I'm planning on spending most of my time in the clubhouse."

"That _is_ how most members of the bourgeoisie play sports." Brennan concluded.

Sweets smiled.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It didn't take her more than forty minutes to locate the place the victim had been found. The Jeffersonian file had contained GPS coordinates and a description of the crime scene, and she'd memorised all six of the scant Ghost Killer files the first evening Pelant had taunted her about them.

The site was a long way out from the club house, but the soil was discoloured and the grass slightly spongier.

She spread a blanket for Christine on some nearby grass and set her up with some toys before she began methodically excavating.

She worked efficiently, taking some soil samples in zip-lock bags at each layer, but even after two hours of work, she was becoming convinced that there was nothing else in the location to find.

Dumping the soil back into hole, and re-covering it with the grass lid she'd cut out, she tried to look at the crime scene the way Booth would look at it. The Ghost Killer had dumped Chloe Campbell's body at the same site she had taken her from – the Caraway Hotel. It was therefore possible that this victim had some connection to the golf club, perhaps a member or employee.

If the Ghost Killer had acted alone, she would have had to drag the victim's body, which would have weighed at least eighty kilograms, out to this spot. That would be difficult.

Perhaps she had used a golf-buggy.

Brennan looked up at Christine, playing under the beech tree on her blanket. It was quite a lovely spot: an artificial stream gurgled beside her. Crocuses had been planted along the stream-banks.

It was picturesque.

_What if the Ghost Killer had lured her victim out here under the pretext of a romantic tryst?_

Brennan tried to imagine two lovers rolling around on the blanket. She began to search the stream bed and the crocus patches for any debris that might have rolled down-hill. _Where would they go?_

Brennan's imagination was suddenly flooded with images of being here with Sweets at dusk. First, she would straddle him, and he would lean up, eager to kiss her. Then she would let him roll her onto her back, and he would brace himself over her, kissing her neck with his full, soft lips and edging her slowly back between the roots of the tree...

Brennan cursed herself under her breath as she crouched down to inspect the roots. She had intended never to let herself mentally revisit the night before. To never even let herself _think_ about the intensity in Sweets eyes as he had stared at her, bearing all his wants and fears for her to see. To forget that his kiss had _freed_ something inside her, so much so that she would have wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and kissed him until he stumbled out into the street with her attached, insisting that he find them a motel room...

If not for Booth.

As if Booth's name had summoned pain, Brennan noticed a small, enflamed bump at the base of the Beech tree. It had been injured somehow...perhaps a piece of the weapon the Ghost Killer had used had been lodged inside!

Drawing out the appropriate tool from her kit, she cored a piece of the tree, a centimetre out from the centre of the wound. Pulling the knot out, she gave a triumphant grunt of discovery: lodged in the centre of the knot was a bone fragment. Probably tooth.

She bagged the specimen, excited, then took a polaroid of the tree. Perhaps_ it_ was the murder weapon! If the victim had been braced above her, face-down, the Ghost Killer could have reached up driven the victim's head into the trunk at an angle, causing the tooth to break off and the stress-fractures seen to the back of the victim's cervical vertebrae three and four.

At the very least, this would have incapacitated him.

After taking several more photos of the site, she gathered Christine's things and headed back to the car. Another hour passed while she jotted her own notes down about the crime-scene and her inferences. She was beginning to get worried, when she saw Sweets, strolling towards her, all long limbs and casual confidence, wearing an obviously-purloined golfing visor.

_How does he make a golf visor look sexy?_ She asked herself.

"Let's go." He said quietly, slipping into the driver's seat and starting the engine.

"You found something." Brennan said, recognising his excitement.

"Yeah, I did." He turned to Brennan, grinning. "There's a list of winners of the Galviston County Members Tournament on a plaque in a cabinet in the player's lounge. Guess who won the tournament in 1979 and 1982?"

Brennan furrowed her brow, wondering how the answer to that question could possibly be relevant to a murder that took place in 2012. "Who?"

"A Giles _McNamara_." Sweets grinned.

Brennan looked uncertain. "Giles is a male name. Pelant said the Ghost Killer was a woman."

"Giles might not be the murderer, but it's a connection between the cases, isn't it? They link back to the McNamara Group." Sweets said.

"It might be a coincidence. McNamara is not a terribly unusual surname." Brennan countered.

"Rain on my parade, why don't you? Fifty bucks says Giles is linked to the McNamara group." Sweets challenged.

"You're on." Brennan said. They both avoided lingering in each other's grip when they shook hands over the steering wheel.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Did you find the crime-scene okay?" Sweets asked as he drove.

Brennan noticed that Sweets never asked questions that set people up for failure. He hadn't asked her "Did you find anything at the crime scene?" because if she _hadn't_, he didn't want to make her feel bad. She added this observation to the growing list of things she appreciated about him.

"I found more than the crime-scene." She gloated. "I recovered a piece of tooth and have constructed a scenario for how it may have become lodged in the base of a beech tree."

She told him her theory about the Ghost Killer sexually luring her victim to the make-out spot, leaving out the part about her erotic visualisation.

Sweets gave her a proud smile.

"You've grown so much as an investigator. You're not just thinking like a scientist anymore, you're thinking like a cop...or, dare I say it, even a profiler."

Brennan was insulted. "I would rather think like a scientist than either one of those professions." she baulked.

Sweets sighed. "No, I mean, it's great that you're able to combine the logical thinking of a scientist with the speculative reasoning of a field that requires a more nuanced understanding of human nature."

"Oh." She flushed a little at the compliment.

But had she changed? Once, she would have ruthlessly shut down any speculation in her lab. Working with Booth had meant at times she had to show respect for his 'gut' instinct, and working with Sweets, she'd made allowances for his profling guesswork.

Now, she was in Texas chasing a phantom serial killer on nothing stronger than Pelant's word.

Was this erosion of the Scientific Method really _growth_? Or had she sacrificed little parts of herself along the way, for nothing more substantial than small acts of kindness to her friends?

She stared out the window.

The corruption of her system _should_ have meant a decline in its efficacy. But it must be admitted, even when she'd humoured Booth and Sweets, they'd all continued to catch killers together, case after case.

She thought about Pelant's message: _I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man._ Was the ruthless application of logic a form of tyranny too?

"You're still an epic scientist, Dr Brennan." Sweets said, after a moment. "I was merely complimenting the development of your other skill sets."

Her eyes widened. "How did you know I was thinking about that?"

Sweets smiled. "Educated guess."

Brennan eyed the visor nestled in Sweets' thick curls. She knew how silky they felt now, what it was like to thread her fingers through them. How soft and sensual his mouth was. The ease and humility with which he gave affection.

Had she allowed logic to tyrannise _her_ when Sweets had asked her what she wanted? Had she made the wrong choice when she'd resisted change?

She turned away from him and watched the world whiz by out the window for a while.

Then, she glanced at Christine napping in the review mirror.

Ultimately, it made sense to stay with Booth, she reasoned.

Even though her feelings _had_ changed. 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

The Dixie Pine Cottages outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, were the first stop on Max's list. They were arranged as relatively private cabins, though they all got electricity from the main building.

Sweets parked the car under a tree, and went to see the manager in the maintenance building.

"Well, hi there! And welcome to Dixie Pine Cottages. My name's Dianne, how may I help you?" The attendee had given this spiel so many times she apparently didn't need to breathe between sentences.

"I'd like to see about a family-size cabin and some firewood? It's gonna be cold tonight." Sweets asked as Sam.

"Number Three, Yellowglen sounds perfect for y'all. It's a twenty-dollar down-payment tonight, ten extra for firewood, and you settle your bill on departure."

Sweets put the money on the counter and she slid across a folder and a key, and a bucket of firewood.

"There's a phone in your cabin, dial three to ring out, the TV gets local channels, there's a child's crib folded in the store cabinet, no smoking in the property and a continental breakfast is served in the Long Room from seven a.m. Enjoy your stay."

Sweets could see why Max had chosen this place. He hadn't had to sign in, there wasn't a computer in sight, and the trees between the cabins would make it virtually impossible to be spotted by satellites as soon as you'd left the main road.

He drove them up to Number Three and parked the car under a giant spruce. They'd get sap and shed needles on the car during the night, most likely, but it was better than getting seen by Pelant.

Brennan and he unpacked most of their things, enjoying the luxury of the fact that they planned to stay two full days here. The combination of pine rafters, sunshine-yellow curtains, sofas and bed-linen made the whole place almost disturbingly cheery.

Sweets went around and drew all the curtains. Then he built a fire in the smoky metal grate and lit it.

"I thought you said you were never a boy scout." Brennan gestured to his fire-building skills.

"There was a fireplace in my family home." Sweets said. "Dad taught me."

Brennan began cooking a creamy mushroom pasta for dinner. "We're going to need more food supplies soon." she mused as she was stirring.

They all ate together around the kitsch pine table. After the relative successes of their day, Sweets was starting to relax a little.

_They'd made progress in the case._

They'd sent profiling notes to Booth.

They'd managed to spend a whole day together without fighting or crying or...being inappropriate.  
Compared to yesterday, today was good.

Well, maybe not when compared to a _certain_ part of yesterday, but he was not even going to let himself _think_ about that.

Sweets played with Christine for a little while before reading her to sleep. There was a main bedroom and a kid's bedroom in the cottage, and Sweets had set up Christine's things in the latter so her cot would be next to his single bed.

He shut the door quietly and came out into the living area, wearing his night shirt and sweatpants.

Brennan was by the sink, doing the dishes in a tank top and pajama bottoms.

"You should have left those for me. You cooked." Sweets pointed out.

"I had nothing more pressing to do." Brennan shrugged. "I can't process the soil samples I took without access to a laboratory, and I'd prefer to wait for Hodgins to analyse the particulates."

That was the highest compliment Sweets had ever heard Brennan give a co-worker; namely, that she trusted someone to do something better than she could do it herself.

"So we give them to your dad to courier back to the Jeffersonian? Man, he's going to be pissed when we tell him we want him to head back off to D.C. again." Sweets chuckled.

"It can't be helped." Brennan shrugged.

Sweets wondered, _Does she keep sending Max away because she prefers it when we're alone?_

Brennan dried her hands and came to rest against the sofa.

"Are we going to do the TV thing again tonight?" Sweets asked, reluctantly.

Television had brought them no good news lately. And neither of them had even really talked about or processed Finn's death yet. He didn't think it would help Brennan to see her youngest intern strung up on the news.

"We ought to." Brennan said. "We owe it to Mr Abernathy."

She dutifully tuned in to the appropriate station, and then took the left-hand side of the three-seater. Sweets was already settled on the right.

_It would be so easy to move over and put his arm around her_. Sweets thought.

But he wouldn't. He was already freaking out about what would happen, when they returned, if Booth ever learned about the kiss.

If Sweets was honest with himself, he knew he might have been prepared to pursue Brennan anyway, even if it meant sacrificing his friendship with Booth. If Brennan had asked him to.

But she _hadn't_ asked. And there was Christine to think about.

The firelight dancing and flickering over her skin wasn't helping any. As soon as he'd done his duty by her, stayed with her to watch Finn on the news, he was excusing himself and going to bed. _Away from temptation.  
_  
_I could just put my feet on his lap. He'd very likely take the hint and start massaging them. Or kissing them. _Brennan thought slyly, looking at the young man sprawled on the right side of the sofa from the corner of her eye, and allowing her mind to wander.

She reprimanded herself: this pent-up feeling was more than likely due to the fact that she hadn't orgasmed in almost a week. Perhaps she could take advantage of the fact there was no toddler sleeping in her room tonight and solve that problem herself.

The news bulletin finally came on. First they showed protesters in the Ukraine. Then there was a story about a factory-fire in China that had spread and killed hundreds. And in slot number three, they showed the ionic columns Sweets and Brennan had been dreading.

"_The 'Monument Killer' who has captured the attention of the nation this week has struck again in our capital. Continuing what appears to be a vendetta against the Jeffersonian Institute, the body of a young woman was discovered in the Jefferson Memorial early this morning. The crime scene was under heavy guard, but officers were rendered unconscious by a gas attack. The young woman was an intern at the Jeffersonian, and is thought to have been targeted along with the two prior victims because of the criminology work they undertook for the FBI..._"

A wave of shock seemed to ripple through Sweets' whole body. "Oh my god, Daisy..."

Sweets' grabbed the remote and shut the news off. Then his hands curled around it in a grip so hard Brennan thought it would shatter the plastic. He brought his fists up to his face and pressed them and the remote violently to his forehead, curling in on himself, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking, the intensity building like Brennan was watching a seizure.

Suddenly, he began sobbing – loud, barking whoops of pain.

Brennan slid over the couch until she was straddling his lap, fighting to get him to uncurl his arms and let go of the remote. She was sure it was going to break and he would cut his face with it.

"Sweets! _Stop it_, you're going to hurt yourself!" She wrestled the remote away from him and held his head between her palms, trying to get his wild and panicked eyes to focus on her.

"I should hurt myself! Look what I _did_ to her..." Sweets sobbed something else incoherently.

"_Pelant_ did this to her. And he targeted Daisy because of where she worked, not because of who she slept with." Brennan reasoned, wiping the tears from his red face with her thumbs.

"You don't know that." Sweets cried. "She didn't fit the type Pelant was gunning for. She was on that list because of her connection to _me_..." his voice was hoarse now "She was the _only_ one, since my parents died, who ever put me _first_, liked me _best_, never made me feel like a _freak_..."

Brennan kissed the crown of his head, his brow, frantic to provide him with some sort of comfort that would stop his self-destruction: he was grinding his teeth, digging his nails into his palms so hard they were actually bleeding. She'd heard of cases where enraged or distraught individuals had pulled their own tendons away from the bone.

His voice broke "...and she would have died thinking I was going to save her, Daisy was like that, she'd think I was going to run in at the last minute on _fucking horseback_, and even as he was flaying her alive, she'd have been thinking _that_ and I would have been here thinking about _you_."

That admission was all it took for Brennan to move her caresses down the plane of his face, until she was kissing him gently, over and over on the mouth, pulling away only to nuzzle her cheek against his like a cat.

"What's the _point_ of psychology, getting inside the mind of serial killers," he breathed haggardly, "their horrible, _twisted_ places, if you can't use it to save anyone?"

"You saved _me_. You did. I would never have had Booth or Christine if you hadn't come into my life. My beautiful daughter. I'd still be that lonely person absorbed by her career." She kissed him again. "And I would never have had _you_."

Sweets sobbed harder than he ever had in his life. He let Brennan wrap his arms around her, and pull his head into her chest while she stroked his head and back like a frightened child.

Finally, he calmed a little, relaxed his crushing grip and looked up into her eyes. They were red and raw from crying, too. She was gazing at him like he was the most important thing in the world.

_Like she would give him anything if only he would be alright._

He grasped his hands around her waist and drew her in to him, kissing her, slowly at first, then passionately. He threw her back against the lounge, kissing the pale arch of her neck, until she knocked him backwards into the armrest. They worked off their anger and grief, vying for dominance, grasping and biting and threading their fingers through each other's hair. Sweets rubbed the palm of his hand up her chest, and cupped the hardening nub of her nipple until she moaned.

_The good kind of moaning_.

They rolled off the sofa, tangling together over their papers and knick-knacks. Brennan pinned Sweets in front of the fireplace, grinding against the hardening in his pants mercilessly until he flipped her and pressed her into the floorboards, his eyes alight with manic energy as his hand found its way down the front of her pants.

She moaned louder, damp around his fingers as he kissed down her chest in reply. She ripped off her shirt, then his, and ran her hands over his back, distantly thinking in some part of her forebrain that she could feel the raised scars like Braille under her fingertips.

Sweets took his hand away from her to remove his sweatpants. Brennan did the same. He was too slow for her liking and he'd barely achieved nakedness when she wrapped her legs around his waist, drawing him towards her.

When she guided him in, a myriad of expressions moved across Sweets' face like a star shower. Worry and self-loathing, adoration and guilt, tenderness, openness and gratefulness competed in his face.

She had never had a partner _watch_ her so intensely, whose movements were so synchronised around keeping his gaze on hers.

He kissed her mouth and neck and ear and breathed: "I love you, you know."

He pulled back to watch her absorb this information. She was close to coming, but, ever-competitive, she drove back at him harder. She bit his neck, and scratched her nails through his hair, until he was coming soon after her. He cried out, and fell heavily, rolling and dragging her on top of him. His arms crossed over her back, holding her to him. He kissed her cheek and then her lips, all the while staring at her.

"You are the most beautiful, incredible woman I have ever met. I can't believe I got to do that." He laughed, and brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed it, palm and back, and then her fingers.

"_You_ have to stop wearing those terrible suits." Brennan gasped.

He frowned at the non-sequitur.

"It's false advertising!" she playfully smacked his shoulder and rolled off him to one side to examine the living room. "Would you believe a _couch-jockey_ did this?"

"Is that what they're calling psychologists now?" Sweets laughed, quirking an eyebrow.

His hand brushed up her stomach tenderly and came to rest between her breasts.  
"I meant it, you know." He looked in her eyes.

She nodded, soberly.

Suddenly, the room felt cold. The fire had died down in the grate but that wasn't it. Talking had  
ushered the betrayal of Booth and the ghost of Daisy into the living room.

Brennan took his hand. "Come to my bed tonight."

Sweets followed her into her room and together they'd climbed into the sheets. They held each other, running deft fingers over noses and cheekbones and orbital sockets and the shells of each other's ears, each trying to make a memory of the other's features, a memory they might need to take with them into the future.

Finally, they made slow, slumberous love again. Brennan fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Their fingers were entwined together on his chest.


	10. Chapter 10

Sweets woke up. He tilted his chin so he could observe Brennan, nuzzled against him. There were chinks of light bypassing the drawn curtains, and although his heart was still buzzing with grief, that light, and Brennan's sleeping form beside him seemed to herald joy.

"I thought watching women sleep was only something men did in films." Brennan said playfully, eyes still shut.

"Damn it, you're awake." Sweets blushed.

"I'm a lighter sleeper than you are." Brennan said, opening her eyes. "It was nice lying here though."

Sweets didn't want to break the spell. But he figured he owed it to her to be the brave one.

"I know...how it has to be when we go back. But thank you, for last night."

Brennan gave him a suggestive smile. "I feel like_ I_ should be thanking _you_."

Sweets gave a soft laugh. "No, uh, I meant...comforting me, the way you did. That was important to me."

Brennan sat up a little in bed, still keeping a hand on his chest. "Is it always like that when you cry?"

Sweets' face gave an unusual little tic. "I've actually never _done_ that before." He admitted. "I mean, my eyes have gotten wet, tears have rolled down, but not that kind of letting go."

He looked a little sheepish as he recalled the state of the living room.

"It was actually a sore point with my therapists when I was younger, that I never really howled about what happened to me. They uh, said I tended to hyper-rationalise my emotions, actually."

Brennan's eyes widened and her mouth attained a comical 'O' shape. "And you gave me such a hard time in our sessions!"

"What can I say? I was sympathetic to your plight." Sweets shrugged.

"Therapists, plural?" Brennan asked curiously, after a moment.

Sweets just laughed. "Oh, yeah. Plural."

Something softened in Brennan's face. "I don't want to be without you, when we go back to D.C. And I don't want you to be without me."

"I don't want that either." Sweets said solemnly. "But I don't want Booth to be without you. Or you to be without Booth."

"Booth would never be open to polyamorous experimentation." Brennan said glumly.

"No, he wouldn't." Sweets agreed, amused. "Frankly, neither would I."

"Even if it was a _ménage a trios_ with two women?" Brennan asked playfully. "Say, Angela and me?"  
"Ooh, you're making it tough to be noble here. Angela is _hot_." Sweets smiled. "But no. I'd be jealous if she got too close to you."

Brennan wondered how Sweets' possessive streak would cope with seeing her with Booth in public. Perhaps he would pull away from them and become distant?

"You don't have to worry." Sweets said, noticing her furrowed brow. "We're friends. Close friends. We will always be there for each other. This isn't the kind of situation where you have to miss out. You can have both Booth and I, just in different ways."

"But what about you?" Brennan asked, worriedly.

Sweets' face shuttered, and he shrugged. "_I _get to keep my friendship with both of you."

_If I manage that,_ he thought,_ it's more than I deserve._

Eventually, Brennan had to get up and take care of her daughter. Sweets stayed in bed, admiring the curve of her bottom as she donned a T-shirt before seeing Christine.

Sweets forced himself get to out of the bed, make it, and get into the shower.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

When Max let himself into the cabin after driving all night, the living room looking like a bomb had hit it. Papers scattered all over the floor. A lamp was broken.

He panicked. Pelant could not have gotten to them so quickly, but he might have hired somebody.

"Tempe!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. No answer. His shoe brushed something on the floor.

_Most of a set of male and female pajamas.  
_  
_That little bastard_.

Brennan came out, with Christine in tow. "You're back!" she said brightly.

"What the hell do you think you're playing at, huh?" Max yelled, brandishing her own pajama top at her. "Booth is on the front line for you up there, watching your friends die, and you repay him by sneaking around with the kid?"

"I..."Brennan looked lost. "You don't understand, Max!"

"I understand plenty!" He threw the pajama shirt, not noticing Christine starting to whine. "Booth turned you down, he made you upset, you started to question things, and you jumped at the first opportunity that came along to feel good again! But Booth isn't the kind of guy you can just mess around with. He's not going to _forgive_ this."

"How would he know?" Brennan shot back defiantly.

"Because Pelant took pictures!" Max grabbed them from his bag and thrust them into her hand.

Brennan was shocked into silence, and dropped the offending paper on the table.

Christine didn't understand what all the fuss was about, and chose that moment to burst into tears.

Sweets came out, fully-dressed, and scooped up Christine and tried to shush her.

"We shouldn't do this in front of her." He said flatly.

"Will you get it through your head, kid. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAMILY!" Max roared.

Sweets shot him an absolutely filthy look as Christine cried harder and nuzzled into him.

"Biological relatedness is imperative in caring for a child's wellbeing, is it Max?" Sweets said in cold, even tones. "You're related to Christine. Look what a good job you're doing of taking care of her right now. Look what a good job you did taking care of Temperance."

Max balled his fists. "You snotty little shit."

"Take her into the bedroom." Sweets put Christine in Brennan's arms.

She hesitated, looking from Sweets to Max. "Don't!" She warned her father, edging Christine away from them into the hall, unable to abandon Sweets entirely by leaving the room.

Sweets turned back to Max with cold, dead eyes. "Do it."

Max didn't waste any time punching him in the face. There was a loud crack as bone broke.

"Unh" Sweets reeled back, sniffing, and patting his right cheekbone gingerly, but he regained his balance and looked his assailant in the eye.

"I've been hit a lot harder than that, Max. A man like you can kill with one punch. If I'm the problem, solve me." he challenged.

It was a psych out. Max knew that. But this was not what he expected. The kid was staring him down, resigned, quite seriously prepared to stand there and be beaten to death if that was what was going to happen.

_It reminded him of a stray cat he'd seen once. She'd attacked a dog so it wouldn't find her litter behind the dumpster. In two shakes, the dog had broken her neck.  
_  
The image doused his anger like a bucket of ice-water. He unclenched his fists.

"Alright, enough dramatics! But do something with Christine. We need to talk."

Brennan gave her father a look of titrated aggression and put Christine in her room.

She spent a moment trying to sooth her daughter and get her absorbed in a colouring book. Bundling a teddy bear beside her, she turned the alarm clock radio on to dull the sound of their voices.

Then she breezed right past Max to the fridge and turned some ice-cubes into a tea-towel, turning her back on him to press the compress to Sweets' cheek. His zygomatic arch was fractured.

She was so angry at Max she could barely speak. Sweets was still glaring over her head at her father. "Come and rest on the lounge." She said to Sweets.

He looked down and softened when he saw the anxiety in her eyes.

"Okay."

Max was grinding his teeth, clearly not enjoying the way Brennan had brushed past him, and the way she had lined herself up next to Sweets on the lounge. The two of them faced him like _he_ was the enemy. But they had more important things to get through.

"Problem Number One. Pelant spotted you when you went out drinking the other night."

Brennan handed the offending photo to Sweets, and he let out a deflated sigh.

"Pelant showed Booth this." He guessed.

"Yep." Max said. "That's Problem Number Two. It's doing a number on his head." he looked Sweets in the eye. "He called himself King Arthur."

He gave a dry laugh. "Lancelot and Guinevere."

Brennan looked quietly from the photo in his hands to Sweets' face. He looked tired. Defeated.

_He's losing all the people closest to him. _Brennan thought. _Daisy. Booth._ And when we go back, he fears he will lose Christine and me.

"Does Pelant know where we are now?" Sweets asked Max.

"He might. But he only showed Booth those shots, so I figure they're the only shots he has."

"Where should we go?" Brennan asked Sweets as much as Max.

"Well, that's the other thing. If you wanted, we could start heading back to D.C." Max tested the water.

"Why?" Brennan asked.

"The last girl that Pelant got..."

"_Daisy_." Sweets grated out, eyes filling with tears. Brennan put a hand on his back.

"Right." Max said, thinking he'd figured out why so much had changed between the two so quickly. "Daisy turned out to be the hero of this story. When Pelant took her wherever he takes them, she recovered from the paralytic long enough to swallow a cockroach."

Sweets stared, eyebrows drawn, uncomprehending, but Brennan's eyes widened. "Miss Wick was very resourceful. She knew that we could gather particulates from the cockroach in her stomach that Pelant was unable to clean off. It would tell us where Pelant was hiding!"

Max nodded. "Hodgins had a field day when he saw that little bug. They've compiled a list of possible hideouts for Pelant: two industrial factories and an old power plant, and they're storming each of them tonight. Pelant should be dead or in custody by tomorrow morning."

Sweets hadn't said anything. He was still thinking about Daisy, making her last act on this earth something as disgustingly brave and selfless as swallowing a cockroach so the Jeffersonian could find her killer.

Numbly, he said: "She knew she was going to die."

_She didn't think I was going to save her at all._

Maybe that made it worse.

He just stared at the nothingness in front of him.

"If they're raiding Pelant's workstation tonight, you should go back right away and help Booth. Pelant might be setting a trap for him." Brennan stated.

"If you think I'm leaving you two alone again..." Max huffed.

"If you think I'm going to let _you_ ride in a car with my daughter and my partner when you've traumatised them both today, you're mistaken." Brennan insisted, eyes black and deadly.

"_Booth_ is your partner." Max growled.

"Booth is my _boyfriend_. He's Christine's father and I love him. But he stopped being my _partner _when he stopped trusting me."

Max threw his hands up in the air. "Have it your way. But you'd better get your act together by the time you get back to D.C. Because there's a man there who's been through hell to bring you two home."

He tossed a couple of shopping bags on the floor at Brennan's feet. "Here. New disguises. Pelant might be out of action as of this evening, but he'll have eyes and ears today. We don't want him telling anyone _else_ where you are."

When Max left, Brennan went straight into fetch Christine, who was considerably calmer, but withdrawn. When she reappeared in the living area with her daughter on her hip, she noted that Sweets was still sitting in the exact same position on the couch.

She put Christine down. The toddler stumbled over to him.

"Hey, Christine." he pulled her up beside him on the couch. The little girl leaned her head against him, sooking.

Brennan poked through the bags Max had left. There was hair dye, a curling iron, some new clothes, and a white Stetson.

"Looks like we got you a hat after all." Brennan waved it at him.

Sweets pulled his lips back in an attempted smile.

Brennan hung her head to one side. "Do you want to talk about it?"

He shook his head.

"Do you think Max plans to tell Booth about last night?"

"No. And I won't either." Brennan promised.

She didn't like being dishonest, but she assumed deceit would be a part of her life from now on. For Sweets' sake, and her own, she wanted the three of them to be able to remain friends.

_Besides, _she thought, _if Booth finds out, Sweets is a dead man._


	11. Chapter 11

Even behind the wheel in a blue-checked shirt and a white Stetson, driving beside the sunset, Sweets didn't feel much like a cowboy.

_The white hats are meant to be the good guys._ he thought.

His cheek was swollen and ached, but Brennan insisted the break wasn't complete and would heal with rest and ice. She was now a cherry-brunette with dark curls that bounced around her jaw-line.

When she had asked him how she looked, he'd only said: "I liked you better as a blonde."

"Do you want to stop anywhere?" Brennan asked Sweets.

"No. I feel like it would be better if we just got home, you know?"

Brennan nodded.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

It was dark, and Sweets was paying a little less attention to the road than he should have been. Brennan and Christine were both napping. They'd taken a more daring route than they'd been used to using, including stretches of motorway, in order to get home before morning.

The monotonous painted lines and the heavy sense of dread about returning to D.C. were weighing him down. He'd have to face the reality of the murders. Face Booth.

His gaze flicked across to Brennan's sleeping face.

He wasn't driving _home_. He was leaving home behind forever.

He'd just refocused on the road when he noticed a dark sedan, coming up fast behind him. Way too fast. Sweets sped up to get out of his way, but the driver _accelerated_.

There was a screeching of tyres and a thunderous metallic clap behind them as the light-blue Toyota was forced off the road.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Christine was crying. Brennan was spluttering, trying to get her arms free of the air bag.

"Shh!" Sweets hissed, slowly reaching for his gun in the glove box.

He could see the shadow of their assailant on the dashboard as he passed in front of what Sweets guessed were his own headlights. _Square shoulders. Heavy, blunt footsteps._

_Private contractor._ _Average I.Q._ Sweets profiled on the fly. _He didn't just shoot into the car._ _He's trying to take us alive. _

When their assailant looked into the light-blue Toyota, he saw a crying baby in the back, a woman slumped forward on the dash, and a young man sprawled back, unconscious in the driver's seat, the door ajar. He edged down into the steep ditch cautiously.

He looked up in time to catch three bullets in the chest.

Sweets jumped out of the vehicle and trained his gun on the prone figure who was gasping and burbling blood on the ground. Brennan came round the other side of the car, training her gun on him as well.

The man reached toward his fallen weapon.

Sweets shot him again.

Brennan observed Sweets' posture. He was rigid, unblinking, his face sheened with sweat in the sedan's headlight. She imagined it was the first time he'd ever actually shot someone. While she personally had no compunction about killing bad people, she knew Booth felt the weight of every life he'd taken.

_Hyper-rational or not, this was the sort of thing Sweets would care about._

"Sweets?" she called, checking that he was not in shock.

He lowered the aim of his gun, without holstering it. "Could you check for a pulse?"

Brennan took a few steps closer to the thug and brushed his gun to one side with her shoe. She reached down to feel for the carotid in his neck.

Her posture relaxed. "He's dead."

"You're sure?"

"I'm equipped to determine when someone is dead, Sweets."

Sweets closed his eyes, and nodded, breathing deeply. Brennan wondered if he was using an exercise to stop himself from hyperventilating. When he opened his eyes, he put his gun away and leaned back against the car. "What do we do with him?"

"We should call the police." She said.

Brennan approached the body once again. There was a wallet with some cash, but no identification.  
Tucked inside the notes section was a slip of paper.

"Blue Toyota. Virginia KGV – 5567" Brennan read out. "Sweets! He was tracking our car."

"Pelant hired him." Sweets figured.

"There could be more people, out there, looking for this vehicle." Brennan realised. "We'll have to take the assassin's car."

"But what about _him_?" Sweets gestured, barely able to look at the body.

"We'll have to leave him. If we wait here for the authorities, someone else might find us."

Sweets swallowed, struggling with the idea. "Won't that make it look like we're fleeing the crime scene?"

"We're fleeing a _serial killer_, Sweets. You've done nothing wrong. We'll explain it all to the FBI when we get home."

Brennan took the keys and Christine and headed over to the sedan.

Rubbing the back of his hand against his mouth, Sweets' vision narrowed in on the body again. He continued to stare at it as he moved to the trunk of their car to transfer their essentials.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They got back to D.C. after 10 p.m. that evening. Brennan had driven the rest of the way.

Sweets had been edgy and pale. It seemed _indecent_ to leave the man he had just murdered lying in the grass. By now, local police would have found the body – a motorist would have called it in. They would be looking for _his_ shoe-prints in the grass, collecting the shell casings from _his_ untraceable gun.

Looking for the killer that was_ him_.

Rationally, he knew, he would be unlikely to serve time. It was self-defense. He'd been run off the road by an _assassin_ with a _toddler_ in the backseat. Caroline wouldn't even work up a sweat getting _that_ case dismissed.

But still. He'd stood over the man and shot him while he was flat on his back.

The FBI was a hive of activity when Brennan pulled in, so it was relatively easy to slip the black sedan into the basement parking. Sweets marveled that it had only been one week ago that he had stood here, swapping guns with Booth.

_So much had happened in a week._

Sweets laughed, suddenly, to himself. Being forced by Pelant to shoot somebody, guilty or innocent, seemed so much less...complicated now than the _other_ moral dilemmas he'd found himself in.

_Maybe he should have stayed home and let Pelant try to teach him the trade._

"Stay here in the basement with Christine. I'll go up and see if it's safe." Sweets said.

"Thank you." Brennan said, cuddling a tired Christine on her lap. "For what you did. I know it was hard for you, but you protected my daughter. I won't forget it."

Sweets swallowed and nodded. Then he jogged up the stairs that would return him to civilisation.

"Big explosion at the Bakersleigh power plant." He found out in the bullpen. "Lots of officers down, but we got the Monument Killer."

_That was it. They could join the grid again._

Sweets prayed Booth would be alright.

He grabbed a rookie officer that he figured he could push around if he had to, and reported the shooting. "If you've got any problems or follow ups, you see Agent Booth." Sweets said. That name meant something in the bull-pen. The rookie was on the phone, looking up the appropriate sheriff's office before Sweets was out of line of sight.

Sweets returned to his office briefly to pick up his mail. He needed to centre himself before he saw Brennan or Booth or any of them again. He flicked on his computer to check his email, when the screen was filled with Pelant's face.

Sweets almost fell out of his chair.

"Well, if you're receiving this automated message, I guess you found me." Pelant said pleasantly. "I hope I went out with a bang." His serene smile was creepy. "Dr Sweets...when you're overanalysing all this later, I'm sure you'll find something of the Greek Tragedy about it: your fall from grace, running away from your destiny, only to bring it down upon yourself." Pelant gave a half-smile. "Violence. Lust. Betrayal." He brandished another print of the photograph of Brennan and Sweets, lightly tapping Sweets' expression before tossing it theatrically over his shoulder.

"So you see, in the end, I gotcha! But I don't like your chances of getting Dr Brennan. No. All you did was mess with her head, betray your father-figure, and abandon everyone else you care about to me. And boy, have I been working through them!" His eyes lit up with merriment.

Then he deadpanned the camera. "Joining me would have been easier. You'd have found it freeing. No more being wound up in repressed knots. The truly exceptional members of the human race have always taken what they wanted. Thomas Jefferson knew that." He chuckled and recited sardonically: "_I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man._ That's all you are, Dr Sweets. The product of a collection of social tyrannies. Your love of psychology. Your work at the FBI. Your education. Your _therapy_. Sets of rules to repress and control the animal within."

Pelant's nightshade expression flickered back to playfulness.

"You know what the best part is? If you have any hope of keeping what's left of your little family, you're going to have to lie to them. Every. Single. Day. I bet you're already getting better at it." He shrugged. "If you think about, it's almost like reincarnation. A part of me gets to live on in you." Pelant gave the camera a coy smile.

"Give my love to Dr Brennan."

The screen blanked.

Sweets scrambled to recover the message, play it again, but it appeared to have self-destructed.

He sat back in his chair, sweating.

_Should he tell someone?_ If Pelant was truly dead, he supposed it didn't matter. He wasn't sure if he wanted the FBI tech guys to see _that_ anyway.

He took a deep breath, and changed into a spare suit he kept in his office. Then he headed back down to the FBI basement.

"You changed back." Brennan said, aghast, when she looked up and saw him in blue pinstripes.

"Yeah." He kissed the top of Brennan's head, an act of finality. "We had to eventually."

"If Booth's not here, we should go to the Jeffersonian. I want to get Hodgins working on the Ghost Killer case right away."

"Dr Brennan, it's 10:30pm. No one will be at the Jeffersonian now."

"If they knew about the raid on Pelant, I imagine that's exactly where they are." Brennan retorted.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sure enough, when they walked through the glass doors, the drawn faces of Aristoo, Cam and Hodgins were staring at a monitor set up by the platform, waiting for the late news. Fisher and Angela were seated at a boardroom table which had been set up beside it.

"Oh my God, you're back! And look at your hair!" Angela ran over and hugged Brennan.

Hodgins sidled up to Sweets, who had Christine tucked into one shoulder, and grabbed his hand.

"Sweets! Not much of a disguise. But I guess the shiner helps."

Sweets smiled graciously. His stomach dropped as he looked over to the table and saw the catty glint in Angela's eyes.

_She knows, too._

Cam and Aristoo rushed forward. "Does this mean they got him?"

"We don't know much more than you do." Brennan said. "We went to the FBI and they said there was an explosion at the power station. We haven't seen Booth yet."

While the rest of the team sat down at the table, breaking off to discuss the implications of the explosion, Angela shot Sweets a meaningful look.

He avoided her by looking down to check on Christine.

"Dr Brennan, Sweets, it's good to see you both alive and in one piece." Fisher said, standing up to uncharacteristically embrace them.

"Dr Brennan, you're back!" Dr Edison exclaimed, walking in from the break room with a coffee in his hand. Oliver was right behind him.

"Yes, and we have information on the Ghost Killer." Brennan announced, standing up and thrusting the bone sample from the tree at Oliver, then handing the soil samples to Hodgins. "Could you run those right away?"

"Dr Brennan, Pelant has taken a huge toll on us all." Cam said authoritatively. "Don't you think we could bring closure to _this_ case before we launch off on another?"

"But the cases are connected." Brennan blinked, not seeing the problem.

"Not everybody uses work to combat emotional stress." Sweets said gently, coming up behind her.

Brennan looked up at him and gave a small embarrassed smile.

Hodgins smiled indulgently. "I'll get right on those soil samples, Dr B."

"Oh, I got something too. Angela, could you run a name for me?" Sweets asked, ignoring all the pointed signals she was sending him. "Giles McNamara. I want to know if he's connected to the McNamara Group."

"He _is_ the McNamara Group. He's the patriarch." Hodgins said, shrugging. "Our families used to know each other."

Sweets smiled playfully at Brennan. "You owe me fifty bucks."

She pouted, but tucked a note from her wallet into his jacket pocket.

Hodgins and Angela exchanged a look with each other.

Cam came back to the table, having just stepped out to take a phone call. "Booth is heading here when the scene is secure. That's why we're all waiting. Do you two want a cup of coffee?"

"Sure, but is there somewhere I can put Christine down?" Sweets asked. "She's asleep."

"She can bunk on the couch in my office." Angela offered, raising her eyebrows, daring him to refuse.

Sweets squared his jaw, and nodded. He'd have to rip this band-aid off sooner or later, and he'd rather do it in privacy. He headed to Angela's rooms. Angela followed him in, watching him like a hawk as he lay Christine down on the couch. The toddler didn't stir. He straightened up and turned to Angela, his expression shuttered.

"So, Baby Sweets. You're all grown up now." Angela began, tossing her head as she spoke.

Sweets rolled his eyes. "Everyone seems to be making a big deal out of one blurry picture."

"Have you _seen_ that picture?" Angela taunted him.

"She was _drunk_. I was _worried_ about her. I don't need the third degree from everybody." He gestured to his face.

"Who gave you that, if not Booth?" Angela inquired.

"Max." He said glumly.

Angela gave a wry half- smile, grabbing his face and turning it to get a better view. "Looks like he went easy on you."

"I know."

"I wouldn't have."

He pulled out of her grasp.

She raised her eyebrows and angled her jaw at him. "Well?"

"You can't help who you love, Angela! But you _can_ help what you do about it." Sweets said, stricken. "I have no intention of breaking them up. Is that what you want to hear?"

"You're _helping_ her in social situations. You're making _bets_ with her. Those are Booth's things. Things she and Booth do together."

"I'm a psychologist, Angela! I was _their_ psychologist. Don't you think I know?"

"Well, stop it! You're back now; leave her alone for a while." Angela groused.

Sweets sighed. "I told her _I'd_ never abandon her." he said frankly. "That no matter what else happened, she would always have my friendship."

Angela was quiet for a moment.

"You know what worries me most? It isn't the way you look at her. It's the way she looks at _you_." She swept out of her office, high-heels clacking like a reprimand.

Sweets let go of the breath he'd been holding and smoothed a hand down his face.

_One scary confrontation down._ He told himself. _Booth to go_.

Sweets returned to the common area. The interns and staff all sat around the table, drinking coffee, clearly prepared to stay all night.

They'd become amazingly close-knit in the last week, Sweets observed. Even Oliver was included, happily chatting to Fisher. _That's what happens when it's a week with three murders in it_. he supposed.

He could imagine Daisy sitting at that table, eyes wide, telling them all how she _knew_ the exoskeleton of that cockroach would preserve the evidence they needed, even in her stomach acid. Waiting for a gold star from Brennan.

He walked up to Cam and drew her aside quietly. "Can I see her?"

Cam looked alarmed and pained as she realised what he meant. "I don't think it's a good idea."

"Please. I can handle it. I want to say goodbye."

Cam's face softened. "There will be a funeral..."

"Cam. Please."

She took Sweets into her examination room and gently rolled down the cloth covering Daisy's head and shoulders. Cam was treating it like a coroner's viewing, treating Daisy like a person, not a scientific object, though she was just sinew and exposed muscle now. Sweets appreciated the respect.

His eyes filled with tears. "Can...can you leave me in here with her?"

"Sure." Cam put an arm around his shoulders before she left.

As Cam rejoined the group, Aristoo looked up and saw the pain in her eyes and the tears she was silently shedding.

"What's wrong?" he asked gently, touching her arm.

"Sweets is saying goodbye to Daisy." Cam sniffed and gave him a watery smile.

The rest of them looked up from the table. It was the sort of fog of heartbreak they'd been living through all week. Angela and Hodgins had taken Wendell's death the hardest, while Cam had cried for hours on the phone to Michelle about Finn.

Aristoo had felt sick when Daisy had been discovered, wondering if because _he'd_ fought back, Pelant had thought it easier to take Daisy's life than his.

Brennan looked longingly over to _Autopsy_, but didn't move.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

When Booth finally came in, he was scratched up and dusty, but otherwise okay. Max had been on scene to pull him out of the rubble when the place exploded. Neither of the men had been willing to leave until they'd recovered enough pieces of Pelant to be sure they'd really gotten him.

"He's definitely dead." Booth announced across the table.

"Would it be wrong to cheer?" Fisher asked wryly.

"Not at all." Hodgins said, smiling as he came in with Brennan behind him. They'd been reviewing the soil samples. "Good work, buddy." He said to the FBI agent.

"Booth!" Brennan ran over to him and hugged him. "Are you okay?!" she began examining his face and limbs for fractures.

"EMTs on scene said nothing's broken." Booth smiled, putting an arm around Brennan's shoulder and kissing the top of her head. "Where's Christine?"

"Sleeping in Angela's office."

"And Sweets?" He looked up and saw the FBI profiler leaning in the doorway of Autopsy, watching his arrival.

"Here, Booth."

After some handshakes around the table, and hugging Cam and Brennan again, Booth strode over to _Autopsy_, leaving the rest of them to buzz about the final end to Pelant's story.

"Ouch, Sweets." He said on approaching the doorway. "You alright?" He tried not to look as pleased as he felt.

"Oh, this? Yeah. Max over-reacted after seeing that picture Pelant took."

_Pelant was right. The lying was getting easier._

Booth looked at his feet, and then directly into Sweets' eyes. "You know, I saw that picture too, Sweets."

Sweets gave a wry smile."Turns out, you can fall in love with someone in a week. Well, a week like the one we just had. But that doesn't mean the person loves you back." He looked wistfully over at Dr Brennan, smiling with Angela. "I know where Dr Brennan belongs, and she knows it too."

"Everyone keeps telling me that." Booth said, his voice light with hurt. "Except her."

"Have you talked to her?" Sweets prompted softly.

Booth said nothing.

_He was obviously afraid of what she might say.  
_  
"Talk to her. You'll find out no one could come between you two." Sweets reassured him. He looked the FBI Agent directly in the eyes. "And even if I _could_, I wouldn't want to."

Booth put out his hand, wordlessly. Sweets shook it.

Then Sweets went to leave. He took a step, and then turned back.

"Oh, right. I forgot. I had to shoot somebody. Pelant hired someone to run us down in the car on the interstate. He died. I told Agent Sears all about it; he might need to follow up with you, though."

Booth gave the kid a sympathetic half-smile. The first kill on the job was always rough. He put his hands in his pockets. "You okay, Sweets?"

"I'll be fine."

He turned and left. He couldn't handle any more lies or goodbyes today.

As Booth watched Sweets stroll to the glass doors of the Jeffersonian, bypassing their table of friends, he reflected that Sweets seemed much older now than he had a week ago.


	12. Chapter 12

It had been a week and Brennan was still acting weird.

Sure, they'd had sex, quite a few times, since she'd returned, and she'd seemed _happy_, if subdued, to be back at home and at the Jeffersonian. They'd been to three funerals that week though. So subdued wasn't out of the box.

It had been hard, meeting Finn and Daisy's families. Wendell's neighborhood. Hanging their framed photographs alongside Vincent's at the Jeffersonian. Booth couldn't help but feel responsible as each of their caskets had been lowered into the ground.

It had been a crazy week for everyone.

Still, there were little things that bugged him.

Brennan and he hadn't really _talked_. About Pelant. About being on the road. About _them_.

And every time he asked about _her_, she found a way to talk about Christine.

She'd had a nightmare she wouldn't tell him about. Whimpering and thrashing around. And when he woke her, she'd look petrified and asked: "Did I talk in my sleep?"

She'd dyed her hair back to its natural colour for Wendell's funeral, but she'd put blonde highlights through it. When Booth had asked, she'd told him glibly that she wanted a 'new winter look' so he figured that she'd gotten the idea from Angela.

And then there was Sweets.

He'd not mentioned how he felt about Bones again. He didn't mention the shooting. Or the road trip. He'd stood at the back through most of the funerals with tears in his eyes that never reached his cheeks, except when he'd spoken to Daisy's mother.

He'd done the shrinky stuff on the case straight after Pelant's and spent time with Booth without looking guilty or resentful. He just looked...sad.

He'd blushed on Thursday, though, when Booth had bumped into him at the diner. He'd been eating a lentil burger.

_That was Bones' order._

"You going vego, Sweets?" he'd asked.

"I haven't been too keen on meat lately. I think one too close a look at Pelant's handiwork turned me off it." He shrugged. "Thank God serial killers never work with fries."

Booth had laughed, but hadn't joined him at the table.

So, things had been strained. And the McNamara case was already causing trouble.

But tonight, things were going to get back to normal. Better than normal.

Booth drummed his fingers on the ring box on the table.

He had reservations at _De Spatzi's_, a trendy Italian place. It had linen tablecloths and napkins and imported European sparkling wines and those little breadstick baskets.

Booth came out of his man cave into the living room where Christine and Brennan were wrestling on the floor.

"I booked a sitter tonight." Booth said.

"Oh, are we going somewhere?" Brennan looked up, slightly dazed.

"Yep. I think you'll wanna look a bit fancy." Booth grinned.

"Can't Christine come with us?"

"No, Bones. It's Date Night." He mimed dancing.

She smiled. "Where are we going?"

He wiggled his eyebrows. "_De Spatzi's_."

Brennan's face fell. "No, Booth."

"What, you don't like De Spatzi's? Everybody loves De Spatzi's." Booth blustered.

"You're going to propose." Brennan said simply.

"You don't know that."

"Yes I _do_, Booth, and you have to stop!"

Booth's eyes were suddenly bright with pain. "I thought, this time, you wanted _me_ to?"

"I like what we _have_. I can _do_ what we have. You and Christine and I, we're a family." Brennan said. "But don't ask me to marry you."

"You love _him_, is that it? _Sweets_." Booth said, slamming the ring box down on the coffee table. "One week with him and you throw all this away."

"I don't want to throw_ anything_ away, I just don't want things to change!"

Booth scowled. "But they've _already _changed, haven't they Bones?"

She looked up at him with tears shining in her eyes. "Yes. They have. You didn't tell me about Pelant. You didn't trust me to keep a secret, or to face the danger with you. You lost _faith_ in us. "

Booth looked sideswiped, wondering if it was true.

He shook it off. "That's _not_ what this is about. This is about _Sweets_. What _really_ happened on the road between you two?"

Brennan stood up and faced him.

_He didn't like what he saw in her eyes._

"Who do you go to now, when you have a problem, Booth? Is it me?" Brennan asked, as though she were presenting evidence.

_No, it's Max or Cam._ Booth answered in his head.

He faltered.

"Who do _you_ go to when _you_ have a problem?" he asked, his voice soft and genuinely curious.

Brennan swallowed. "Angela or Sweets."

He scratched at his head, aggravated. "When did this happen to us?"

"You've been pulling away from me ever since Christine was born. You don't treat me like a competent adult. You don't _trust_ me. And now, I don't trust you." she said sadly.

"But you _know_, Pelant..."

"...it's not about _Pelant_, Booth! It's not about _Sweets_! It's about you and I!"

She ground her heel into the floor. "We're _family_, Booth. I love you, the same way I love Christine or Max. I always will. What we have now, it isn't perfect, and I can't pretend it is. But it _works_. And it's good for Christine."

He paced, processing. "So you want to be _with_ me, but you don't want to get married?"

"Yes."

Deep down, he'd known when he bought the ring that the proposal was a kind of test.

Booth scanned Brennan's face. He said softly: "The problem is, Bones, _I _don't want to be with a woman who doesn't want to marry me."

Tears ran down her face.

"Thomas Jefferson said that you can't expect a man to wear the coat that fit him as a child. I can't just rewind three years and put our relationship back the way it used to be. And neither can you."

There was a long pause.

Booth furrowed his brow, and made himself look Brennan in the eye again.

"If you couldn't be with me, would you want to be with _him_?"

Brennan gave him a watery smile. If he was honest with himself, he was _still_ a little bit surprised when she nodded.

"_Really_? You're in love with_ Sweets _– are you sure?"

"_Yes_, Booth." She almost laughed.

He sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face. "Then you'd better go tell him."

Booth couldn't quite smile as Brennan hugged him enthusiastically and bolted out the door.

Settling on the lounge, he picked up his daughter and rocked her, putting his face on her belly to hide his tears.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Brennan was breathless with red-rimmed eyes and flyaway hair when she knocked on the open door of Sweets' office. She looked manic.

He looked up from his pile of paperwork, and blinked a little.

"Dr Brennan, what are you doing here? Is everything okay?"

"Booth and I broke up." She said with a grin that didn't match the statement.

Sweets' face fell. "What happened? I thought you were patching it up?"

"He dumped me. _He_ doesn't want to be with someone who doesn't want to marry him. And _I_ don't want to marry someone that I love without trusting." Brennan laid it out like it was a simple equation.

"And you're...happy about this." Sweets stood up and crossed the room to her, trying to gauge her expression better.

Brennan nodded. "Aren't you?"

"No! The _last_ thing I wanted was to tear apart a family, and a relationship that I put no small amount of effort into bringing about." Sweets complained.

Brennan stopped. "But don't you see? This wasn't about _you_. The problem started months before you and I went away together. Booth knows that. He sent me over here to you."

Sweets boggled. "Those are _four_ statements I find_ very_ hard to believe."

Brennan was starting to look anxious. This was not at all how she thought this meeting would go.

"Are you saying you don't want to be with me?"

Sweets put his hands on Brennan's shoulders and ran them down the length of her arms until he was holding her hands.

"That's_ all_ I want. This last week has been a nightmare! Angela warned me off going _near_ you, you know, so I've been trying to avoid you for her sake, while making it look like I _wasn't_ avoiding you in front of Booth. It's been a freaking _pantomime_. And at the funerals..."

Brennan reached up and pulled him into a long kiss that effectively silenced him. Her palm, flat on his chest, could feel his heart-rate pick up as she leaned into him. He smiled into the kiss, allowing himself to be distracted when...

"Mmm...no, wait. We need to _talk_ about this."

He pulled back from her and looked her eyes, a serious furrow in his own brow. "There's the _age_ thing. Then there'll be the fallout from _everyone _at the Jeffersonian._ Angela_ will kill me. If Booth and Max don't beat her to it. Then there's your living arrangements to consider. Did you talk to Booth at all about shared custody of Christine?" He paused to take a breath. "You're smiling. _Why_ are you smiling? None of this is going to be easy." he said plaintively.

"I don't _want_ my life to be easy." Brennan smiled up at him. "What I want is a partner to face it with. But you're right. There _are_ some things we need to talk about." She took a deep breath, clearly nervous.

"When you asked me what I wanted, I should have told you – I want _you_. I want you never to wake up alone again. I want you to never feel like a freak, or ashamed of your past. I want you to be able to cry without emulating a grand mal seizure."

Sweets blushed, and dropped his gaze, clearly embarrassed. "Dr Brennan, that's not_ exactly_ the romantic speech every man longs to hear."

Brennan looked confused. "But I want to do those things for _you_ because _you_ do them for _me_. You comfort me and support me, you help me come to terms with my past. You see the growth in me and you praise me for it. You're thinking of me in the phraseology of your questions, when you take Christine for me, in every hand of cards." She gave him a small half-smile. "You're brave for me. You listen to me. You _change_ for me."

Sweets had tears in his eyes now. "I love you, Temperance."

Brennan wrinkled her nose.

"Wait, you didn't think I was going to call you _Dr Brennan_ forever?" he laughed.

"I don't see why not. I can't see myself acclimatising to calling you Lance."

Sweets frowned and tilted his head, feigning worry. "That's very Oedipalof you. Disturbing. We might need to have a session about that."

They both smiled, and linked their arms around each other's waists.

"You're the only man I truly _trust_."

"I know." He smiled down at her. "But I'm glad that you said it."

To some men, it would have sounded like Brennan was dodging saying, "I love you too." But Sweets knew what she'd said was so much better.

"Speaking of change, I noticed the blonde highlights." He gave her a wicked school-boy grin. "I _definitely _noticed."

"And_ I_ noticed your quinoa salad." Brennan said, looking pointedly at the tupperware container on his desk.

Sweets blushed. "What? I hear it's good for my health."

He picked Brennan up, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, losing her fingers in his curls as he pushed her back towards his desk, kissing her neck.

"The door!" she exclaimed.

"Oh, right." He swung her back around, tumbling her against the walls of his office until she could reach out and push the offending walnut rectangle shut with one flailing hand.

"So, Dr Brennan, do you think I could take a look at your finances now?" Sweets panted, undressing her on his desk.

"That really depends." she smirked, "Have you still got that golf visor?"

THE END


End file.
